Apple Thoughts: Apple MACronomics: Embracing the Ecosystem

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Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Apple MACronomics: Embracing the Ecosystem

Posted by Brad Wasson in "Apple Articles & Resources" @ 05:37 AM

The Missing Manual

OS X is full of these sorts of "hidden" features that make it a nice platform to work on. I'm the type who likes to explore and understand these sorts of features, so after a few days of learning about my new Mac I realized I wanted a faster way to unearth them.

Figure 2: A book you might want to consider getting.

A visit online to Chapters (our big bookstore chain in Canada) revealed a number of books on the Mac OS X Snow Leopard platform. I was drawn to the O'Reilly book titled "OS X Snow Leopard - the missing manual" (written by David Pogue) based on my past experience working on the Unix platform and having read their reference books. I purchased the title locally at our bricks and mortar Chapters store, and started on page 1 of the 600+ page manual. Wow, what a treat! This book is a treasure trove of information about every conceivable feature in the MacBook Pro's OS X operating system. Written in an engaging fashion, the book speeds the development of your understanding of the whole platform, and I highly recommend you make it a desktop companion within arm's reach of your seat.

Likes and Dislikes

With the above commentary you can probably already infer that my Mac experiment has gone pretty well and that I am pleased with the journey to date. So, in the following, I will highlight a few more impressions, good and bad, that I have developed.

Keyboard - the MacBook Pro keyboard is very comfortable and I can type on it for extended periods of time and enjoy it without strain. Like my previous notebook, a Dell Studio 16, the MacBook Pro has a backlit keyboard that lights the keys in a darkened environment. This is a feature that once you have you will not want to do without (like heated car seats, here in Canada!). I will say, however, that I greatly miss the Home and End keys, and the PgUp and PgDn keys that I've had on all my other keyboards. The MacBook has various key combinations that will provide the same functionality, and once learned, things are not too bad, but given a choice I'd have them as separate keys any day.

Non-glare screen - my laptops follow me to numerous client sites and other locations while on the job as a management consultant. I have found in the past that most sites I go to have lighting that reflects strongly off normal laptop screens. This is not only annoying, but requires a constant refinement of the screen angle as you move your position from moment to moment. When I discovered that the MacBook Pro could be ordered with a non-glare, high-resolution, screen I jumped on it. I have not been disappointed. It's amazing how quickly one can forget about glare issues after you move to a matte-finished screen. This MacBook Pro has a slightly lower resolution than my Dell Studio 16 had, but for my primary uses it is just fine. This screen is highly recommended.

Quietness - this is another area where the MacBook Pro shines. My Dell Studio 16 was a real workhorse for me, and served me very well. There were a few annoyances with it: it tended to run very hot (i.e., the temperature of the chassis on the underside was often uncomfortably hot), it was quite heavy to carry around, and frequently it needed to turn on (or turn up the speed of) the cooling fans. Were those fans ever noisy - once running at high speed it was impossible to ignore them. By contrast, this MacBook Pro is quiet! Whisper quiet! Again, it's a little thing, but it sure adds to the total user experience to have near silent operation.

Suspend/sleep - as Steve Jobs likes to intonate, "it just works". This is another one of those "worth the price of admission things". I can't say enough how nice it is to just get up and leave the Mac to power down on its own, or to get up, close the lid, and head off to the next location. When you open the lid again, or wake the Mac from sleep, it's ready to go. Applications are in the state you expect them to be in, and the system's performance does not seem to be compromised. This is huge. If your Windows experience was like mine, sleep/suspend state was inevitably followed by the need for a reboot. I don't know what exactly the issue is in Windows, but in my experience that feature has never worked properly. It just works on the MacBook Pro running OS X.

Parallels - if you read my introductory column you will know that as a longtime Windows user I wanted to transition to the Mac environment with some Windows applications in tow. There are a few ways to accomplish this, but I chose to employ the Parallels virtual machine approach, and I'm pleased to report this is working exceedingly well.

Figure 3: Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac. This software allows you run a complete Windows environment on your Mac.

To start you have to install Parallels (which is as easy as installing any other app) and then configure your virtual machine. In my case I have allocated 4 GB for OS X and 4 GB for Windows. Thereafter you install your Windows operating system, following the standard install routine. This took less than 30 minutes, round-trip. Parallels offers a number of operating modes for your virtual machine, including a full-screen mode, a windowed mode, or a "Coherence mode" where the Windows apps appear seamlessly on the Mac desktop alongside the Mac apps. From my experience to date, the full screen mode offers the best performance, essentially indistinguishable from running the laptop as a pure Windows machine. The windowed mode also works well, and I often switch to that mode, depending on if I'm in dual screen or single screen setup. The Coherence mode also works well, provided you don't have to move windows around a lot. Dragging windows around in Coherence mode is a bit slow and laborious, but if you set your windows to your preferred size and location and don't modify them much, then Coherence mode is a nice way to work.

External keyboard/mouse - Since I knew I would be using my MacBook Pro with an external monitor in a quasi-docked state, I ordered the wireless Apple keyboard and Magic Mouse. As you will probably know, keyboards and mice are very personal experiences, and people tend to love a particular feel. From my perspective I find the wireless keyboard a pleasure to type on and would recommend it. As with the MacBook Pro's keyboard, it's missing some keys I'd like it to have, but this issue is surmounted shortly by learning new combination keystrokes. The small, metallic feel of the keyboard grows on you and in short order you can type efficiently. From my readings of forums and review sites the Magic Mouse is a bit controversial. Some love it, others not so much. I have found that when working on native Mac apps I love its design and performance. Scrolling through websites with just a flick of a finger across the top of the mouse is very effective. Unfortunately, the mouse behavour is not as good, in my opinion, when using it with Windows apps under Parallels. For some reason the mouse pointer tends to jump around from place to place in your document at random times if you even lightly brush the mouse. This is especially disconcerting while working in Microsoft PowerPoint, where you can be happily editing a slide, and then a moment later looking at the slide 3 slides earlier in your deck. This is likely related to the Windows mouse driver employed, but so far I've not been able to resolve this (if anyone has any ideas please let me know in the comments).


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