One Foot Through The Portal

This will come as a shocking surprise to anybody who knows me but... about 10 days ago... I bought a Mac.

This after 28 years of CP/M, DOS, and Windows, starting with Windows 1.0 through XP.

Why the change? Because I think I got tired of things not working.

I've actually been contemplating this change for quite some time. A few months, anyway. I dunno, maybe the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials finally got to me: I wanted to be cool Mac Guy, not that shlub PC guy. A case of identity denial maybe. And all my friends are using Macs now... you know all those creative people who record music, make movies, etc. I don't actually do any of that stuff, but some days I think I'd like to.

The final straw was about two weeks ago when I decided I wanted to record some music on my computer. Of course, all my musician friends have been telling me all about their Macs and recording stuff with Garage Band. And I admit coveting that ability. But first, I thought I'd see if there was comparable software I could run on my PCs instead.

I did some research online (i.e. I Googled "garage band for pc windows") and found a program called Sessions made by M-Audio, a subsidiary of the company that makes Pro Tools, which is pretty much the industry standard for digital audio recording.

So I called my neighborhood music store, Corner Music on 12th St in Nashville (nowhere close to my actual neighborhood, but, then, neither is my neighborhood pub, McCabe's in Sylvan Park...). I asked them about Sessions. They said, "we don't have that, but we have the newest coolest thing which is even better and costs twice as much...." It's called Sequel, it's made by a company called Steinberg which I guess is some big German company, and it retails for $99 instead of the $49 sessions would have cost. So, like an idiot, I bought it.

And then I brought it home. And installed it on my big powerful desktop PC, an 18 month old Dell XPS 400 Whiz Bang Machine. And then I started the software, and tried to record something. And the software just flat didn't work.

That's when I threw in the towel and went to the local Apple store. I watched a demonstration off all the nifty programs like iMovie and iPhoto and Garage Band. And I said, "wrap one up." I made my first digital recording of my guitar that night (although I haven't made one since...)

So now I am trapped between two worlds. I like the Mac, but it's not perfect, like the absence of a right-mouse button and a couple of other keys is rather infuriating. But it does have a nice solid feel to it and there are aspects the operating system that are appealing. A lot of those features have been replicated in the latest version of Windows, called Vista but, then... it's still Windows and the big question remains: does it actually WORK?

I was long overdue for a new laptop. The one I've been using is over three years old and that's about the life expectancy for any day-in, day-out computer. I have ordered the latest greatest niftiest sexiest computer from Dell, their XPS m1330, but that was ordered over a month ago and there is no sign it is in any danger of shipping any time soon. But that's a whole other story. I got the Mac in the meantime.

There are things I like about it and things that I don't like about it. And the bad news is, I seem to have no choice but to keep running certain Windows-only programs, like my e-mail client (Eudora) and a note-keeping component of MS Office called OneNote that is not avaialble yet for the Mac -- a common problem with the Mac platform. The good news is there is a program called "Parallels" which will run Windows in... well, in a window. So Windows becomes, in effect, part of the Mac OS. I have Eudora and OneNote and a browser window open in Windows, and I'm trying to keep the rest of my work in the Mac OS.

There are tradeoffs, like the aforementioned missing keys, and whoever designed the palm-rest for this MacBook appears to have flunked some of his classes at the Apple School of Brilliant Design, because the edge of the chassis is a very sharp corner that digs into your wrist after it's been resting on the keyboard for a while.

But this afternoon, I found a utility that let me re-map portions of the MacBook keyboard so that I could make an extra "enter" key into a fwd-delete key, and the rest of the missing cursor functions I can get used to doing as a two-key salute.

All of which means... Dell, you blew it.

Comments

[alison]

ctrl+click on a mac is the windows right click equiv. welcome to the darkside, where machines actually work and creativity is at the forefront.

[mdave]

First welcome to the Mac. I was in the same situation last year. Mac user in the 80s & early 90s switched and now I work in both.

If you bought a laptop, in the System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Trackpad there are settings for what Apple calls gestures. You can set it when you tap the trackpad with two fingers it is the same as right click.

Parallels 3.0 rocks, when you right click (aka gesture two finger tap) and choose what application the document will open... parallels includes a list of the windows apps too. If your running Parallels make sure you have at least 2gig of RAM.

If you need any other crossing platform help give me a shout.