Cheryl on the Web

What can I say? Some people go for Big Macs, I go for little ones :D Yes, I’ve taken the plunge and bought one of the new Intel-based Macbooks from Apple. Since my old laptop entered the retirement home (trackpad broken, hard drive half corrupted), I’ve been using my work computer for private internetting and the mix of those two things is not a good thing for stress levels. So when I decided to get a new computer for personal use, the first and most important criteria was that it not remind me of work. What better way to achieve that than to buy a Mac?

So, the verdict is in: read on for more :)

The Verdict
Macs ROCK! :) I’m never going back to the PC, at least not for personal use. So far, there’s nothing I could do on the PC that I can’t do on the Mac and the Mac offers so much mooooorrre.

Nice Piece of Work
Before I continue by telling you how nice the user interface is and how robust the operating system is out of the box, I want to pause for a moment of awe for the machine itself. The Macbook is a light, thin laptop with a 13″ widescreen (resolution 800 x 1280).

Mine has a Powerdrive, which is a CD/DVD burner in one, and unlike the drives on most laptops, you’re not forced to open the drive in order to insert a disk which is a HUGE advantage - you just stick the disk in.

Check out the pic on the left. It’s a screw, no it’s a smudge, no it’s a built-in webcam just above the screen in the middle! The center hole is the cam itself; the pinhole to its left is a microphone, and the hole to the right is a light sensor so the picture lighting is adjusted appropriately. And, of all the webcams I’ve ever used, this one works the best. I’m especially impressed by its auto-adjustment for various lighting conditions. Isn’t it cute? :)

Last stop on this tour is the set of ports along the left, a beautiful little row of 1cm holes: power, network, HD video out, firewire, 2x USB, and audio outs - everything I need :D I’ll connect my external harddrive via firewire which is also useful for our videocam connection, and the USB port instantly recognized my USB card reader for reading of photos from my camera.

So what about the user experience? Read on for more…

Browsing
I use Safari for my web browsing, which comes preinstalled. Take for instance, uploading a file on the Mac from a web browser: instead of an ugly text box with a “Browse” button to the right, there’s a pretty “Choose File” button, and once you’ve chosen a file for upload it’s name shows to the right of the button.

And the Safari browser is much quicker at loading web pages than Internet Explorer not to mention that it offers tabbed browsing like any proper browser should. And somehow it loads images much better so when the page displays you aren’t left with random parts of it missing or still loading: everything is just THERE.

E-Mail
I’m using the mail program that comes pre-installed. I was able to import my email messages from Microsoft Outlook by first uploading them to my web server (IMAP) and then downloading them again via POP. The mail program is simpler than Outlook 2003 which I was using but is actually in many ways better. For instance, when you are reading a mail it links all the email addresses into your address book, so instead of seeing xxx@yy.com in the To: section, if the person’s in your address book it will say “Bob” and the name will be linked to the user’s information. Even Outlook 2003 doesn’t do that for me on my POP mail. And when you select a message, Mail highlights all the related messages in your inbox which is really handy.

Photos
I took some pics on my camera for this post and when I attached the card reader to the computer, the iPhoto application opened and asked me for the name of the album and instantly helped me organise the photos into my collection. From there, I can order printed copies of the photos, email them, publish them to the web (there are great templates that automatically put them all in web pages), and more. I can also edit all the photos, do batch work on them, and compress them for web display - all in this free program that comes with my Mac! How cool is that.

I just keep running into these things on a Mac and have to say, Yes! This is the way it should be. There are many more stories to tell, but those will have to wait for another day ;)