mindlace

I got a base-model MacBook Pro to replace my dual 2GHZ G5 desktop. I’m thrilled. At the moment it has been upgraded with 1GB of ram ($75) bringing it to the same amount as on my G5.
Performance
So far it has been equivalently fast with the exception that disk reads from the dual 7200 RPM raid array was much faster than from this machine’s single 5400 RPM drive, and going from 160GB to 80 was a noticable shift. Rosetta (PowerPC) emulation is slow but adequate; All of the software recommended below is available as a Universal Binary.

User Experience
The 1440×900 is enough that I can comfortably run two windows, or the mac-popular “one window and all its floating palettes” comfortably. It’s requiring some un-training as I’m prone to having one window, or two or three terminals, be the entirety of my workspace.

I get the Spinning Beach Ball of Delayed Gratification from Finder much less than I did on the G5. The same more-or-less goes for other apps, though the Mozilla programs are still the champs.

Spotlight has been a pretty bad scene for me for a while. It consistently refuses to find files that are new or it just doesn’t like for some reason. I understand that I’m not the typical user, but the whole appeal of spotlight is that it would index the thousands of pdf’s on my machine and actually give me results from them. As it is, strings I know are in a pdf because I found them in Preview are not coming up with hits in Spotlight. That continues with the MacBook; I intend to set things aright as the promise of Spotlight is too great, but in the meantime, Path Finder has been a life saver.

The glowey keyboard is triple fat, the big trackpad and two-finger scrolling makes me almost not hate it and its absurd single button, and the integrated iSight is a delight, if mostly a toy so far.

The magnetic power connector is nice if a bit on the falling-off side of things; still, I appreciate not yanking on the power connector of my laptop, something I did with every other laptop I’ve had. I have unfortunately tested the motion sensor, and I did not experience any damage when it fell off a low table while on.

The Missing Software

These pieces of software should be installed on every mac. I’ll get to the ones I use for my particular expression later, but everyone should have these. Only one costs money.

• Quicksilver is the Missing Interface for the mac. It is an utter must-have that makes your computational life much easier. Make sure you go through the available modules and install all the stuff that sounds useful; Quicksilver is one of the few applications that facilitates serendipity and having more available actions is actually not very distracting.
• Virtue is the best multiple-desktop software for the mac. It allows me to cluster related windows in separate workspaces, so that I can interrupt a task without interrupting the set of applications I have running. It’s like fast user switching without the user business. I set my Virtue to have four desktops and use the Cube transition so that I can get a spatial memory for where different things happen.
• Firefox is the best browser on earth, its sometimes halfway-there mac support notwithstanding. Extensions – like Scrap Book, Greasemonkey, and Web Developer – make it an incredibly versatile tool. Technologically, its support for SVG and XSLT make it superior to the polished utility of Safari. It certainly still has its quirks; I cannot figure out how to force it to download everything to one directory no matter what helper app launches the downloaded file, nor can I persuade it that it really doesn’t have to ask me if I want to download a .dmg file.
• X11 – Too much useful software requires it. Would it really be that confusing to pre-install it?
• Path Finder – I know Jobs would rather eat his own intestines than offer a competing Finder, but only Path Finder ($35) has been able to accurately search my local and mounted drives. PathFinder’s inability to remember a folder’s view has demoted it from primary finder interface for me, but until Apple gets its act together with Finder – something they haven’t done in seven years - it is pretty much essential.