2006 / May 28^th/ My initiation into the Apple club

Over one year ago, I wrote about switching. Well, the time finally came and I could finally afford to get my very own Apple. So, May 1st I took the plunge and pushed the buy button. A little under $3,000 and a week later, I was ripping open the most beautiful black box I’d ever seen. Inside was a brand new MacBook Pro.

[beware: the following is an outpouring of caffeine filled thoughts with little to no cohesion]

Without a doubt, this is the most beautiful piece of computer I’ve ever had the privelege to use. In terms of design, it’s absolutely brilliant. The laptop is amazingly sleep and has the smallest profile I’ve ever seen on a laptop while still remaining sturdy. Plus, the Magsafe! Wow, it works even better than I possibly thought. Perfect piece of applied engineering meeting industrial design. I could go on, but in short: this thing is wonderful.

But what about the speed? This thing absolutely flies. Hell, it even feels faster than my dual 3.2ghz beast at work (most likely due to the extra ram). Needless to say, almost everything has gone Universal now, so Rosetta is a friend that doesn’t visit too often. Unfortunately Photoshop is one of those apps, and you sure can feel it. Oh well, designing on a laptop isn’t exactly optimal anyway - I’m better off sticking to my PC for that sort of thing.

iSight is my friend

To be perfectly honest, when I first heard about the new built-in iSights (dude, iSight is in OSX’s dictionary. How badass is that?) I was more concerned with the 80 pixel loss than getting some new toy that I thought I’d have no use for. I was wrong.

Photobooth is one of the coolest apps I’ve ever played around with. Great for those nights you just want to sit around and get absolutely nothing done. However, the craziest thing I’ve been able to do with the iSight is use it to scan in products to Delicious Library. Holy. Crap. This is the coolest thing ever. For those of you not familiar with this process - basically, you open up Delicious Library, hit a button that brings up a little screen showing you a black & white view of your iSight with little red horizontal lines running across. You then take the back of your DVD case and scan the barcode with it. Delicious Library then beeps, sends off a request to some servers somewhere and adds the proper movie/cd/book/game to your collection with all the proper information. Coolest thing. Ever.

Growl is the shit

Growl is exactly what windows tooltips should have been. Customizable interface. Non-intrusive. I love how it automatically connects with other applications (like Mail.app or Transmit) and lets you know about things going on (like uploads finishing). Loving this app.

Loving the GUI again

Now, I’m not saying that the whole OSX world is brand new to me. I’ve had a Mac at work that I use every day, but it’s still running Panther and is an ancient G3. I mostly just use it for IM/Email and browser testing. However, now that I have a Mac that runs at the speed of light, I’ve found a whole new love for OSX. It truly is the best operating system on the planet. Exposé works like a charm, Dashboard is ingenious, and of course Quicksilver makes the entire system hum together in harmony.

The terminal is a wonderful thing

Since becoming infatuated with Rails, I’ve started to love the terminal. Unfortunately, on the PC the terminal is more like a wounded animal than a beast of pure speed and power. Finally now that I’m back on OSX I can love the terminal again. I absolutely love being able to control so many of my processes like Apache, MySQL, Ruby and so on from the level everyone else is at — rather than from the sidelines of an all-in-one installer from Windows land.

Now for something completely different…

So, now I leave you with this obligatory Photobooth photo.

1. 

   Alex Foley

   May 29^th | #

   Congrats! I hope to be making the jump to a Mac Mini one of these days… I don’t have the guts to dump my IBM (uhh, I mean Lenovo) Thinkpad. That fingerprint scanner is just oh-so-cool.

2. 

   Sean

   May 29^th | #

   i just made the exact same jump and am loving it the same way. what a beautiful machine. thanks for the tip about delicisous library and growl.

3. 

   Andrew

   May 29^th | #

   Ooh, you’re making me excited. I’ve ordered a MacBook Pro as well, which should be arriving in the next few days.

   It will be the first Mac I’ve owned, after lusting after them for more years than I bear to think about.

4. 

   Suyog

   May 30^th | #

   I have been wanting to make this switch since a long long long time now - and I am still not there yet. Hopefully in the next two months….. I want a mac book!

5. 

   Shawn Grimes

   May 30^th | #

   Congrats Kyle. I too have recently joined the club. What a club it is too! ;-)

6. 

   Wired

   June 11^th | #

   FYI there are similar windows based versions of software like Delicious Library, but none are free that I can think of. Anyone know of some?

   Nice pic Kyle :)

7. 

   Bruce

   June 15^th | #

   “The laptop is amazingly sleep”?

   You mean sleek? Sleep is what you needed instead of a caffeine-filled outpouring; it was clearly on your mind! ;-)

8. 

   Mark Bowen

   June 19^th | #

   Hi there,

   Glad you have a nice new MacBook Pro. I have been trying for ages to get one that actually works properly. I am currently waiting for my 5th, yes 5th!! MacBook Pro to arrive.

   All of them so far have had problems with the screen or other things wrong with them. I am currently waiting for it to arrive from Shanghai!! Hopefully no more than a week this time.

   If this one is not up to scratch then I am going to ring up Apple AGAIN and this time insist that I can take it to one of their authorized repair centers and they get them to fix it on the spot whilst I wait. I don’t really want to have to do that as I shouldn’t really have to get a brand new machine fixed before I have it but I am just desperately needing the machine now and so will probably have to!!

   Glad you got one of the good bunch though!

   Best wishes,

   Mark Bowen

9. 

   Kyle

   June 19^th | #

   Mark: That’s a bummer. It seems that when apple screws up, they tend to keep screwing up with the same person (I remember Hicks’ whole fiasco a while ago with his powerbooks). I’m glad to report that my MBP is still in excellent condition, no complaints from me :)

10. 

    Liam R

    August 7^th | #

    Dude, if you like Quicksilver check out a little app called Butler, it’s the muts nuts !

    Liam

    P.S. Welcome to the club - I trust you know the secret handshake (it’s at the back of the manual). :P

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