Tom's New MacBook Pro

Come on and zooom a zooom a zooom

tsummerall — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:55:19 +0000

One of the UI features of Windows I miss most when I’m using Macs is the ability to resize windows from any side or corner. It’s just, inarguably, a better way of doing things.

I was despairing over this until I found Zooom. It’s actually in some ways better than Windows resizing…you just have to be over the window near a side or corner to resize, though you do have to hold down key combinations to activate it. I wish it would handle resizing from the edges without meta keys. But overall I’m pretty happy with it.

More on the Screen

tsummerall — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:48:25 +0000

As I mentioned, the MacBook Pro anti-glare screen I got is very bright, but I do notice the following characteristics:

1. Its horizontal off-angle viewing is very good

2. Its vertical off-angle viewing is not. Even just shifting the position of my head up or down (much less actualy changing the screen angle) can show large contrast changes in the screen.

Comparing this with my 2 year old thinkpad hires screen shows that the ThinkPad is the winner. The horizontal off angle is worse on the TP but the “sweet spot” for veritcal and horizontal off angles is much bigger and more practical, because after all, both h & v matter.

Fear of a Drive Buy

tsummerall — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:20:44 +0000

So far everything has been working great, but I have become aware of a terrifying trend in which the 7200 RPM Seagate drives that you can get build-to-order, and which I did, are stuttering and otherwise acting terribly.

As result I am looking into a back-up program called Super Duper to try to make a bootable back-up (which Time Machine does not) since the time I spend installing and configuring software is worth almost as much as my data. If Apple called today and said “Your drive is going to go bad here’s another one free” it would take me days and days to get back where I am now unless I could clone the current one to the new one.

Outlook Appointments to iCal

tsummerall — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:16:04 +0000

I googled this and tried to install a special macro into Outlook etc and it was all just taking way too much time so I just entered my appointments manually in iCal. There doesn’t seem to be a great general solution to automating this, but if you have many many appointments you’ll want to look into the right one for you.

Outlook Contacts to Mac Address Book

tsummerall — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:14:26 +0000

This took a bit of research, but luckily not too much.

Basically you install Thunderbird, use it to pull the information out of Outlook, then use Thunderbird to save it as a LDIF and open the vcard with Address Book.

Slightly more detail here.

Note:

Prior to doing this on the Win side you’ll need to set Outlook as your default email program. You do this in Internet Explorer’s internet settings panel.

I did this with Win XP and Outlook 2002. Some versions of Outlook let you convert all your contacts to vcard directly, which Mail.app can also open.

Power Trip

tsummerall — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:06:15 +0000

I have to say that so far the MacBook’s non-user-removable battery has proven its worth. I get much closer to the advertised battery time than any other machine I’ve ever had. My ThinkPad, by comparison, eats battery power at a terrifying pace.

Perchance to Dream

tsummerall — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:04:35 +0000

I routinely use my Windows machine’s hibernate function rather than shutting it down. It preserves exactly what I was doing with all open apps and documents, yet it shuts the machine down completely. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to do this on my new MacBook, but a little googling revealed that there is a not-officially-supported way to do this under OS X. It’s a command line command (of course) but Deep Sleep is a great dashboard widget that triggers this hidden functionality.

I have been using it flawlessly for a week and it’s terrific!

The MacBook’s Edgy Design is Sharp!

tsummerall — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:55:59 +0000

Unfortunately I mean that in a bad way. The Keyboard-containing aluminum surface ends below the trackpad with a 90 degree shift to the front edge. The corner of this edge is surprisingly sharp. It’s not sharp enough to cut you, but when I sit in certain ways and type it presses into my arm and over time leaves a red indentation. I don’t call that user-friendly. My ThinkPad has a nice taper over a two inch area creating a much more comfortable surface for resting my wrists.

This is a great example of mindless Apple fanboyism. I googled “sharp macbook edge” and immediately found various threads discussing this subject from years back. (This has evidently been a problem since the first MacBooks with plastic enclosures.) In these threads I found people honestly trying to find a way to live with this problem, and fanbois mocking their discomfort. Suggestions included “You don’t type the way you are supposed to.” Responses to that jokingly suggested that the MacBook is so ergonomic that it forces you to improve your own posture.

Luckily there’s a pretty cheap fix. Cool Feet lift the back enough to get the edge away from my arm.

The Mac Fail Dialog

tsummerall — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:37:55 +0000

I find that Windows XP is simply an OS more directly aimed at the pragmatic people programmers tend to be. I don’t mean I’m a big fan of command lines – I generally loathe them, but I do like the fact that Windows often provides the advantages of a command line combined with the advantages of a GUI.

The Windows “file open” dialog is perhaps the ideal example of this. Let’s say I want to send someone a file from a folder containing a large number of heterogeneous files. With Windows I can instantly filter the files to only the type(s) I’m looking for, right click on the file I want, zip it, change its name to something shorter, and then send it. Some of that I can do with OS X – but only with Default Folder X, which I highly recommend.

It’s ironic that the designers of OS X, which is based on the best command line system in the world (Unix), have chosen to create such feature-free dialog boxes that don’t even support type filtering with wildcards.

I understand that Mac OS X seems to eschew the File dialogs in favor of Spotlight and the Finder, and maybe I’ll find myself altering my practices to use this, but right now I find Spotlight awkward.

It’s funny, one of the best experiences I’ve ever had with file dialogs was Mac OS 9 in concert with a system extension known as “Super Boomerang”. Neither Windows nor OS X have achieved the elegance of that combination.

It begins

tsummerall — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:03:10 +0000

As with all Apple products, unwrapping was a pleasant experience. What wasn’t pleasant was the fact that I had to go to the fedex warehouse to pick it up. Why? Because for some inexplicable reason Apple prints the county in giant sized letters on the mailing label. As a result the deliveryman took the machine to the town near here that shares the same name as the county I happen to live in many miles away. Needless to say he failed to deliver. That could have gone on for a number of days until the machine got sent back to China. So note to Apple: Fedex doesn’t need the county. Zip codes will do just fine.

Opening and closing the new mchine is a pleasure – it closes like a luxury car door. It seems to open wider than previous generations, though still nowhere near the almost 180 degree range of my ThinkPad’s hinges.

The machine is very heavy, but I knew that going in.

The screen is very bright and the resolution is very sharp, maybe a little too sharp for my eyes given the coding and graphics work I’ll be using the machine for. I’m not sure if I’ll be upping the font sizes in my apps or using the machine at a lower, blurrier resolution.