the road to Mac

I’ve been pondering it for quite some time, but yes now I have switched to Mac.

I purchased a new 2.5ghz, 4gb of Ram, 15″ Macbook Pro. Purchased the 320gb 7200rpm hard drive seperate for about $109, and I’m pretty happy so far. I miss the extra screen real estate that my Dell d820 offered, but its not _that_ significant. Besides, my current plan is to ride this one out for a few months, maybe get an external monitor and keyboard for when I’m doing some serious work. Then, when things are right, upgrade to the 17″, once they update it, and maybe sell this one, or just keep it for kicks.

So, the transition hasn’t been so bad. I have some issues on the keyboard, mainly the moving of the Control key. Getting used to not being able to Alt Tab (Cmd Tab) between multiple windows from the same application. But most are minor issues. I do have some software problems, that I have yet to sort out 100%….

I miss Winamp — Why are Mac users so in love with iTunes ? Its horrible, it dosen’t support watch folders, its klunky at best, and its slow. I’m not asking for much, a simple clean interface (like the winamp iPlay skin), a library that dosen’t try to move, rewrite or modify my collection, CD ripping (MusicBrainz support would be nice with this), possibly some streaming media options, and of course watch folders !

What, no Visio — Microsoft, is this your evil plan to prevent people from switching ? Seriously? For now I’ll either be running visio under VMWare Fusion, or Crossover Office. (Which was free a few days ago).

Font Rendering — This is going to just take time for me to get used to. With reguard to fonts, Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness. Apple’s method, to me at least, makes the fonts look horribly chunky and slightly blury, very distracting and hard for me to read.. Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

As for stability, I’ve had random issues with the mac so far, lagging during shutdown, program crashes, etc. But my current issues a few and far between. Soon, I’ll do a software review and let you know what I’m using.. Of course, as always, comments are welcome !