As promised long ago, my Mac post.
My PC at work died; an old, slow machine, to which I had added (out-of-pocket) a 256K DIMM to bring it to a whopping 512K RAM. Not really missed, to say the least. I was able to salvage the contents of the hard drive, so no problem there. My supervisor, your typical Anything But Microsoft geek, preferred that I get a Mac. So he ordered me a Mac Mini with 1GB Ram and an 80GB HD. Sure, fine.
All I really use the computer for, at work, is a web browser, email, and a terminal window; and since I had just shifted all my email to Gmail (a browser-based email), even that was reduced. Even so, while not an MS-lover, I had at least beaten XP into submission; I had it set up the way I liked, I had bought (again, out-of-pocket) an SSH client (SecureCRT) that I preferred, and various test apps and utilities. Now I had to do the same for the Mac.
First, the SSH client: with SecureCRT I can open a separate window to each of 5-6 servers, each in a different color scheme: this allows me to easily keep track of which server I'm on. The latest version I bought added a tabbed interface, so now I can have one window, with a tab for each session. Not possible with the Mac; but since OS X is Unix-based, the ssh client is built in; and I found a free utility, JellyfiSSH, that "bookmarks" terminal sessions, so I can use that to open multiple color-coded sessions, at least. The new OS version, Leopard, seems to offer a tabbed terminal built-in. Hunh.
The browser is not an issue, really; I use Opera, and there is a Mac version available; but gmail doesn't work as well with the Mac version. I found a browser that uses the Mozilla Gecko engine, called Camino, and it does the gmail for me, as well as interfaces with some firewall devices we use that don't like Opera (on the PC, I used Internet Explorer for those). I also have to use Safari, which I don't care for, just to access my Sirius Satellite Radio streaming broadcast: the plug-in only works on it. So I'm running three separate browsers.
I found a free text editor, TextWrangler, that I use instead of the standard TextEdit. I just like it better. And I had to find a wrap-the-cursor around the screen utility, because I use a trackball and that sort of thing makes sense for trackballs (and touchpads). And so on. A utility that locks the screen for when I am away from my desk, without me having to log out, or hibernate, or anything: just lock the screen and input devices: thank you.
Printing: we have a Canon multipurpose device. It uses a parallel cable. The Mac is USB-only. Got a USB-to-parallel cable, and it don't work: the cable does, but there are no drivers for this thing. I am using my sup's personal USB printer, and we're working on getting a new one from the company.
The worst part of the whole deal is Windows: there are one or two apps, particularly our billing/service-order management app, that are Windows-only. With the Mac I got Parallels, an app that lets me load Windows XP (any OS, actually) within a virtual machine running on the Mac (sort of like Apple's own BootCamp, without the reboot). It takes 512K of my 1GB RAM (any less and Windows would suck wind), and I can forget about doing anything else while it loads. When I am careful, I have no problems running Windows apps within it; setting up the networking to connect to the office network over a VPN was tricky, but it is working okay now. Point being it would all be unnecessary if I had just been given a PC in the first place.
All that said, the Mac isn't too bad. Nice wide-screen monitor, the CPU is zippy, and I can work on it with no problems. It just brings its own set of frustrations with it, after I had gotten used to the ones that come with XP. In addition, the keyboard (using the Apple key and so on) is different than what I am using at home: the key strokes, anyway, since I am using the same type of keyboard, not a Mac keyboard (and my own Logitech MarbleMouse trackball). And the close button for the window being in the upper left rather than the upper right. It's the shifting back and forth, work to home, that generates the (mild) confusion.
And thus endeth my Mac post.
1 comment:
For the record, I have installed iTerm, which is open-source from SourceForge, as an SSH client. It has the tabbed window, different colors, and so on that I prefer. I had a devil of a time getting it to do a destructive backspace when I used the backspace key on my Windows-centric keyboard; but that was more my problem than its.
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