Adventures of a Windows pro in the OS/X world
Okay, let me just start with saying that this is the best laptop on the market, heck no, it’s the best computer on the market! The hardware is simply mindblowing. Simple as that.
When i wrote Mac Stories, part I, i was still getting used to this machine and especially to OS X Leopard. To be honest, i wasn’t convinced that OS X was that great compared to Windows XP or Vista, but the more time i spent on it, the more i started to realize how fantastic this operating system really is.
So i’d like to share with you some of my experiences of the last couple of weeks.
Last time i wrote that my first Safari experience was about Gmail not working properly. I fixed it quite fast by selecting the new Gmail interface, but still, it didn’t give me a lot of reason to trust the new Apple browser i was starting to use. Now, after a few weeks, i can honestly say that this was the only problem i had with Safari. So far, everything else went very smooth and fast and without further problems. I’m also still using Firefox because of the many amazing Greasemonkey scripts available, especially for Flickr users. Both Safari and Firefox have their own unique features so using both cannot be avoided right now. :-). Adding sites to bookmarks isn’t a problem here, because i decided to put all my favorites on Delicious, that way i can easily access them on every computer regardless of platform and browser. Both Safari and Firefox have neat Delicious plugins, so putting my bookmarks online involved no hassle whatsoever.
OS X Leopard has a great new feature called “Time Machine”. When I connected a USB drive for the first time, Time Machine automatically became active and asked me if i wanted to use this drive for Time Machine backups. I confirmed and then the drive is formatted and the first full backup is created of your entire OS X system. It runs in the background and while i continued to work, i didn’t notice any slowing down of the system. After the first backup, Time Machine will automatically do incremental backups (for the non-techies: this means backing up only changed files instead of all files). The only way i can tell that Time Machine is doing this, is because i can hear the USB drive starting to spin. If the USB drive would be completely silent, the Time Machines process would be 100% transparant! Maybe the experienced Windows users are asking now when and how i configured Time Machine. Well, that’s just it: you don’t! :) As a Windows user and engineer, it’s hard for me to understand how it’s possible that i will have the opportunity to restore files one hour in the past, or eight hours or three days, whatever, or even restore my full system *without*(!) any configuration on my part. So… does it work you ask? Well, a few days ago i installed a small update for one of my applications. After the update ran, i couldn’t start the application because it asked me, again, for registration and activation. Because i didn’t want to go to this activation process again, i decided to just restore the application from an hour ago. Allright, time for my first Time Machine test! :) I clicked on the Time Machine icon and i browsed the timeline to one hour before that moment (it’s a very cool interface btw!). I selected the application and clicked on restore. At that point, you get a visual representation of the application flying through time and space from one hour ago to now, which is nice, because then you know you did it right. Time Machines starts the restore process and after 30 seconds, the application was restored and i could start it again! This is a fine example of smart and very user-friendly software, which does the job without annoying the user during its install, setup or afterwards when using it. Ten points for Apple on this one. :)
Allright, enough for now.. more on my OS X adventure later on, so stay tuned.
