So. How’s that working out for me?

Surprisingly well, really. It’s not pleasant, but it’s usable for a while. I think I miss the hardware more than the software, though I certainly prefer Mac OS to Windows XP. The screen is so small and so low down that I’m feeling the risk of neck ache, and it doesn’t feel good for my eyes. I’ve been spoiled with that 24″ screen, though!

One of the first things I did was to install ResophNotes, which gives me access to my writing and ‘thinking’ space – the same data I’d normally access through Notational Velocidy on the Mac. I have DropBox, so many of my current files are still available. Although I use Apple’s Mail app for my email, it’s all stored in Gmail, so I can just open a browser tab and I have my email all up to date. I’m a little in limbo at the moment for calendars, but Google Calendar is currently my ‘master’, so I have that available.

I keep my notes in Evernote, so I just updated that to the latest version and let it sync. I’m using the web version of Twitter instead of the Tweetie (or Twitter official) client. My tasks are all in Remember The Milk, so they’re online anyway.

I had access to all of my most important data very quickly.

I’m still missing all the data on my external drives. Windows would be able to access them if they weren’t in Mac OS Extended format, but that would mean I wouldn’t be able to use Time Machine to keep them backed up. And since it’s Time Machine that means I’ll be able to bring my Mac home with a new hard drive and get it back up and running to pretty much where I was, I’m happy with the trade-off.

Wii » [ | : UK, US]

When I switched to Mac some time ago, I was prepared for the fact that there weren’t as many games available. Before that I’d been using a tablet PC with no CD or DVD drive, which would have been enough to stop many games from working anyway. Age of Empires is the only ‘real’ game I’ve played much of, and even that probably averages out to less than one game every couple of weeks.

All that said, I was still quite glad to see the arrival of Steam for Mac, with a bunch of new games available, and more to follow. Even better, to celebrate the launch, they’ve made Portal free for both Mac and PC for a couple of weeks. Portal is similar to the old platform games we used to play back in the days of 8-bit home computers, but with a big twist. It’s fully 3D, from a first-person perspective. Imagine a first-person shoot-em-up like the old Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Unreal Tornament, etc; but instead of running around shooting anything that moves, you’re walking around completing a series of puzzles. In the early stages, at least, there’s very little real peril. Nothing is trying to kill you, and you’ll work the puzzle out eventually. In the stages I’ve reached now, though, things are getting a little more dangerous, with a few ways to die.

The result, for me at least, is a more fun experience. The puzzles are cleverly built, and there’s sometimes more than one way to beat them. It’s very immersive, and takes a bit of thought.

Steam itself seemed quite flaky at first, crashing several times as I tried to have a look around the store. It was updated the next day, though, and again the day after, and seems much better already. I’ve heard elsewhere that this is fairly common with Steam and their products – lots of problems for the first day or two, but they quickly fix things.

I’m eying up my next Steam purchase already (I suspect Civilization IV is my kind of game), but it’s well worth taking the chance to get Steam and Portal while Portal is free.

I used to keep lots of apps running all the time – email, Tweetie, Evernote, iTunes, Transmission, Google Chrome. All running, all the time, even overnight. Chrome always had a few tabs open – PigPog’s dashboard, Facebook, Google Reader, and usually a few things that I might decide to do something with at some point. It was a land of distractions, and things ground to a halt when I tried to run Aperture.

I installed iStat Menus, after reading about it in Smoking Apples. Aperture ran, and all my RAM was used. MacOS paged furiously out to disk, but couldn’t really keep up. Aperture would hang when building previews, sometimes for hours on end.

I tried closing almost everything else, but it didn’t help much.

I finally got around to testing the two 2Gb memory modules I’d removed when one became faulty, found out which one it was, and put the other back in. My Mac now had 3Gb rather than 2Gb.

I ran Aperture. It quickly used over 2Gb RAM all on its own, finished the processing it was doing, and shrank back down to around 200Mb. Just as it should. Looks like the problem was that with 2Gb of RAM, doing that just took a lot of paging in and out, and so, a lot of time.

By then, though, I’d taken a bit of a liking to having less stuff sitting open. I do quite like to see emails when they arrive (I don’t get many at home, so it’s not much of a distraction), but I don’t always need the Tweetie window there on show. iTunes doesn’t need to be running when my iPod isn’t actually syncing. Evernote doesn’t need to be running all the time, though it’s quicker to throw things into it if it is. Mail can at least be closed overnight.

As for the browser, I’m trying to make it a habit to leave it running, but with no windows actually open. That way, it’s very quick to start if I click a URL somewhere, or want to have a quick look at Facebook. The rest of the time, though, there’s no need to keep things open. I just need to check for any spams or comments on PigPog once or twice a day, and look at Facebook occasionally. Google Reader doesn’t need to be checked obsessively – just looked at sometimes. When I want to.

So far the results are good. I’m spending less time repeatedly checking the same sites and feeds several times an hour. The only problem is staring at the relatively blank screen, and wondering what to do next. I decided to write. I’m writing this now.

Producing some sort of output, rather than staring at Facebook and Twitter for an hour – sounds like an improvement to me.

I hadn’t actually planned to take two days off work so I’d be off for the day of release of Snow Leopard. It just happened that way. I’d booked the time off in order to spend a little time with Sam’s mum (quack, quack). Then, it just happened that the second day I’d booked was the day of release.

So, it would have seemed rude not to go to Exeter, pop into the Apple Store, and pick up a copy of Snow Leopard Family Pack.

So we did.

It was packed. Really, amazingly busy. There were a few people buying Snow Leopard, but most of the crowds were there for Macs, accessories, iPods, support, training, etc. The staff were doing their best, and were doing a nice job of occasionally hurrying down the lines of people, apologising for the delays, and promising to get to everyone soon. I joined a queue after a while, and paid for Snow Leopard. I also had a mouse to sort out, but that’s another story.

I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t in a desperate hurry when we got home, but the pressure was too much. I soon gave in, and stuck the DVD in the drive. I made sure that Time Machine had backed up recently enough, then ploughed in to the upgrade. In a disaster, I figured I could always install again from the original Leopard CD that came with my Mac, and migrate the data and apps from the Time Machine backup.

There was no disaster.

It took around an hour in total, and I was left with a system that worked pretty much the same as it did before, with a few nice little tweaks. Purely subjectively, things feel nice and snappy – I think it’s faster in quite a few places. It’s always difficult to be sure with such things, though, without any real testing.

So far, the only app that didn’t work was CyberDuck, but a quick check for the latest version showed a new beta that worked fine. It turned out, that was the final anti-straw to get me to make a little donation to the developer. It’s a free app, and works really well.

All told, there isn’t a huge amount to get excited about in Snow Leopard, but for the small cost, it seems well worth it. An cheap, easy upgrade that made the OS smaller and faster, whilst polishing a few features.

Surely that shouldn’t seem as strange as it does?

I’m left with just a couple of oddities. Video is jerky in QuickTime, though it may only be when using Perian codexes. Hopefully an update to one or the other will sort it out soon. Also, when I close iTunes, it immediately restarts itself, and hides the window.

Neither are major problems for me, so I’ll just Google them occasionally – answers usually take a little while to appear for a new product.

Update: Found the solution to the iTunes problem. I was running a little app called I Love Stars, which put a control to rate tracks into the menu, hiding itself unless an unrated track was playing. Getting rid if it removed the problem. It wasn’t causing the problem until Snow Leopard, so either something changed, or it was quite a coincidence.

The jerkiness may be more widespread than I’d thought – some YouTube videos seem jerky now, and some animations, too. Aperture’s keyword controls are supposed to slide neatly into view, but actually appeared in a series of jumps, taking a long time to fully display. Right-clicking seems to take a very long time in a few places, too, including iTunes.

• Switching to Mac Part 1: The Decision
• Switching to Mac Part 2: The Retail Experience
• Switching to Mac Part 3: The Unboxing
• Switching to Mac Part 4: In Use
• Switching to Mac Part 5: Finding a Photo Editor

Latest Update: See the ‘Update’ section at the end – a useful extra feature in DoubleTake makes it even better.

One thing that struck me as a bit odd about the whole process of switching to the Mac was that there didn’t seem to be an obvious choice for photo editing. On Windows, I’d happily used The GIMP, and loved it. I didn’t see any reason to change, until I tried actually using The GIMP on the Mac. It doesn’t run as a native app, it runs under the X11 interface. That means it doesn’t get a real menu bar, and it doesn’t look or feel like a real native app.

Things that look and feel a bit crap aren’t so jarring on Windows. On the Mac, though, it’s a different matter. The machine is beautiful. Most of the software is beautiful. Running The GIMP under X11 in the midst of all that just didn’t feel right.

Photoshop is available, but it’s expensive. Really expensive. The vast majority of the editing I do is pretty simple, so there’s just no real need to spend that much. There’s Photoshop Elements. That’s a much more reasonable price. It’s a version out of date on the Mac, I’m not sure I like the direction it’s going anyway, so a step behind isn’t a problem. The feature set isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough for me.

A while ago, I ran a little test. I had trial versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, along with a couple of good Mac native photo editors – Pixelmator and Acorn. I took an image that wasn’t very good, but worked out a few steps that would make it usable. It was a mallard. I selected the duck, inversed the selection, and desaturated the background. I then reverted the selection to the duck, and over-sharpened it to make it pop.

• In Acorn, the selection was really hard work. Feathering the selection seemed to be ineffective. The adjustments didn’t turn out well.
• Pixelmator was better, but still not great. The results took some work still, but less, and looked ok in the end.
• Photoshop was great – easy to make the selection, as if it was doing most of the work for me – and the result was nice and smooth.
• Photoshop Elements was harder than Photoshop, but not much harder. The difference was probably due to it being based on an earlier version of Photoshop.

I concluded that Photoshop Elements was the one for me.

I didn’t get around to buying it.

This weekend, I started trying to work on photos again, and happened on an article that listed some useful Mac apps for photographers.

The main thing I like to do with my photos that requires anything beyond what Aperture can handle is making what I usually call ‘Photo Constructions‘. Think of panoramas, where you take several photos of a scene, with the camera setting locked, and then stitch them together to make one big image. The usual aim is to make the joins invisible. After seeing an article in Practical Photography magazine about Michael Hallett, though, I didn’t want to hide the joins. I loved his style of rough panoramas, or Constructions. I loved his habit of including his own shadow, or even a foot, in the final work. I’d always thought that the last thing I needed, then, was software designed to seamlessly stitch panoramas together.

The article mentioned DoubleTake, though, and I decided to give it a go. It was very quick and easy to use. I threw a pile of images at it, intended for one of my Constructions. It seemed to have a pretty good idea of what to do with them. It did try to stitch them together, but seamless stitching wasn’t possible with such a rough heap of photos. I rather liked what it did with them. I rearranged them a bit, and liked the result even more. I put a few images from the same set around the merged result, and liked it a lot.

The only problem was that it tried to merge any image added to some extent. I couldn’t layer another image over an ‘empty’ part of the original (like an area of grey sky), which I like to do. I realised that I needed two things – one panorama maker, and one more general photo editor. Pixelmator was pretty good at the image editing, and DoubleTake was pretty good at making the base panorama.

I had some doubt, though. Photoshop Elements had a routine for making panoramas, and could certainly do the rest of the job perfectly well. I wanted to try it out again, but installing a new copy still knew my trial had expired. My gut feeling was that Photoshop Elements was the final version I’d get for the money, and it wasn’t a good well-written Mac app. Both Pixelmator and DoubleTake were nicely written, and felt very Mac. I installed the latest version of Pixelmator, and it gave me another chance to try it out.

DoubleTake did it’s job perfectly. Pixelmator is very fast and does it’s job well. It isn’t perfect, but a new version is due soon, free to owners of previous versions, with more features. And, it’s from a small independent developer, not from Adobe. It’s written from the start as a Mac app, not something derived from a bigger app, written primarily for Windows.

I bought licenses for Pixelmator and DoubleTake. Using the SmokingApples coupon code, I saved 20% on Pixelmator, which helped a little. DoubleTake was more expensive than I’d expected, as they seem to have decided that UK VAT is 25%, not 15%, and the Euro exchange isn’t as good as I’d remembered, but even at £20, it does a job that’s otherwise a lot of work, with ease.

I’ll know better when I’ve spent more time with them, but I’m pretty happy with my choice at the moment. They both work very nicely with Aperture, too. I can select the images I want in my basic panorama, and drag them straight from Aperture to DoubleTake on the dock. It attempts to fit them together, so I just need to tweak what it’s done. I then just click the Aperture button on DoubleTake’s toolbar to send the image back to Aperture at full resolution. From there, I can open that image in Pixelmator as the external editor, drag any further images to layer over it straight from Aperture, and save the result straight back. Aperture just shows the final image as a new version of DoubleTake’s original export.

Update

It’s a week later, and I’ve learned a little more. The developer of DoubleTake, Henrik, contacted me to let me know that it actually can build constructions without merging at all – just hit ’0′, and it stops merging images. I’ve tried it out today, and it works. I’d hoped it would let you turn off merging, and drag another image or two into place, leaving the rest still merged. What it actually does is just turn off merging completely. All the merged images un-merge themselves. Hit 0 again, and they all go back to how they were.

For doing constructions the way I always have, it can do it very quickly and easily, so it’s an even better buy than I’d thought. I may well still play with its merging functions, though, as I do like the results.

Henrik also explained about the VAT calculation. As I really should have known, EU states collect VAT at their own rate, and Danish VAT is much higher than UK VAT. PayPal displays it badly as ‘UK VAT’, but it’s being collected correctly.

• Switching to Mac Part 1: The Decision
• Switching to Mac Part 2: The Retail Experience
• Switching to Mac Part 3: The Unboxing
• Switching to Mac Part 4: In Use
• Switching to Mac Part 5: Finding a Photo Editor

It’s taken me a long time to get around to writing this post, but here it is at last.

When I last posted about switching, I’d just got the machine unboxed and started up. I was impressed with the experience so far, but hadn’t really started using Mac OS yet.

How did I find the machine to use? Did it just work?

Generally good, and yes and no.

The User Interface

The new interface didn’t take as much getting used to as I’d expected. The Dock is quite a nice thing to use, and I even quite liked the animated effects. I switched the interface to grey, getting rid of the blue highlights – the less colour involved in the basic interface, the better you can judge colours when fiddling with photos.

Having the menu bar fixed to the top of the screen, when it relates to the window you’re using at the time, seemed a little odd, but again, it wasn’t as difficult to get used to as I’d expected. The location of it doesn’t entirely make sense, but you always know where it is, and it’s very quick to get to.

The strangest part was finding myself having no idea how to do some quite simple tasks. I already knew that Mac apps usually arrive bundled in a .dmg file – a Disk iMaGe. It was no surprise to double-click one, and find it mounted itself on the desktop, and auto-ran the contents. I knew I had to drag it to the trash can to unmount the image. I had no idea what I had to do with the contents to install the application, though. I had to Google. Just to find out how to install an app.

It turned out to be quite straightforward. For most apps, the window that opens up contains the app itself, and sometimes a shortcut to your Applications folder. You just need to drag the app into your Applications folder, and that’s it installed. Some apps actually do need to run an installer, though, so it isn’t entirely consistent. Uninstalling an app is usually just a matter of taking the app back out of the Applications folder. If it needed an installer, though, there isn’t always a straightforward way of uninstalling. As far as I can tell, though, even these apps only commonly add a few bits to a folder of their own under one of the ‘Library’ folders.

An app is just a single ‘.app’ file. Except it isn’t really. I guessed what they really were, as it’s the same as the old Acorn Archimedes used. The .app ‘file’ is really a folder, which the OS makes look like a file. Double-clicking on it lauches the application, by running a file or script from inside the folder. Under normal circumstances, you don’t need to know or care that the app is a folder. If you need or want to, though, you can open the folder by right-clicking and selecting ‘Show Package Contents’. Probably best not to fiddle with the innards of your apps, though, unless you know what you’re doing.

Speaking of the Archimedes, the dock has its similarities to the old Archimedes bar – apps live there when they’re running, and can stay running there even when their last window is closed. Unlike the Archimedes, though, you can get any app to stay there, even when closed.

The only part of the interface I still find frustrating is creating new documents. I was in the habit of using the ‘New…’ right-click menu in Windows, and it had always made sense to me. Go to where I want the document, create a document of the type I want, then open it and start working. Many people have never worked that way, and would find the Mac way of doing things perfectly natural – run the application you want to use, start working, then save the document through the application when you’re ready, using the Save dialog to put it where you want it.

I’ve always found that an awkward way of working – the Save As dialog isn’t a nice way to get around the filesystem on any platform, and until you get around to saving the document, you have a load of data sitting there with no home. The first save is harder to do, so you put it off longer than you should, and have the risk of losing unsaved work. I’ve found a couple of neat work-arounds for this whole issue, though, which I’ll post about another time.

The Hardware

The hardware is beautiful. It all feels wonderfully solid and well-made, too. I get on surprisingly well with the tiny wireless keyboard. I mostly love the Mighty Mouse. The little scroll ball on the top of the mouse, though, gums up fairly often. Apple, it seems, forgot that there was a reason we all gave up on mice with balls. The same thing on a smaller scale, being rubbed around by your finger all day, with no way of opening it up to clean it, is a bit of a bad move. I’ve always been able to get it going again with a bit of firm rubbing with the mouse upside-down, but it feels like a bit of a design fault. On an Apple product. That’s just wrong.

Software

There’s very little software I miss. TrackMania would be nice to have back, but it’s not worth dual-booting or running a VM for.

Oddly, for a machine so rooted in design and photography, image editing software is the one area I haven’t quite got settled on yet. On Windows, I used to use The GIMP. It’s available for the Mac, but it isn’t a pleasant experience. It runs under X11, so it doesn’t get its own menu bar, and doesn’t act like a Mac app. There are a few decent independent attempts at making image editors native to the Mac, so I tried pretty much everything I could find. Once I had a few options, I tried making the same set of simple edits to the same source image in them all. Photoshop Elements stood out as being much quicker and easier than the others. Making a selection was much easier, and making changes to the selection ended up with something that looked right, while the others ended up looking a mess.

I haven’t quite taken the plunge and bought it yet, but I probably will soon.

I actually do very little editing of the sort that needs a real image editor, though. On Windows, I’d been trying out Adobe Lightroom, but really didn’t get on with it. It felt slow and awkward, and seemed to have real performance problems when dealing with the number of images I had. I could get around it by splitting into multiple libraries, but switching between them would be more hassle than I wanted. I bought Aperture at the same time as my Mac, and loved it from the start. I still do. Almost everything I want to do with my photos can be done without leaving Aperture, and with a neat little plugin, I can export directly to my Flickr account.

The Result

I’m glad I made the switch. I still use Windows at work, and switching between the two every day makes things a little harder, but there are far more things I miss from the Mac when I’m using Windows than the other way around.

A colleague told me he’d bought a Mac because he hates computers. I told him I bought one because I love computers.

They offer Special Delivery for an extra £3.50, which is less than cost. I didn’t take it, and my memory still arrived the day after the next working day.

It’s safely packaged, but small enough to fit through a letterbox. As long as it works, I’d call it a pretty excellent service from the start.

• Sorry, Mac Users