My first Mac impressions, or rather, my first impressions for the newest line of Macs since OS 9... I really hate the Apple fanboys. Well, I hate fanboys pretty much all over as they are never very balanced in any of their views, but today, I really hate the Apple fanboys.
Immediately the computer needs well over a GB of updates and several reboots. Three reboots to be precise. What is it that I keep hearing fanboys going on about Windows and rebooting? Hmmm... Well, that myth for OS X is debunked. It requires rebooting as well. Nevermind what they fanboys rant about Windows. Same thing goes for OS X.
I really do like the way it plays videos though. Very smooth and the remote makes it a sheer pleasure.
Resizing windows is miserable though. It's especially difficult with Xcode (the software IDE for Macs) as you need to try to fiddle with a million windows and there's only 1 way to resize things with the grip in the lower right. If it's close to the dock at the bottom of the screen, you've got to move the window, which is time consuming and tedious. Not really a fantastic example of good UI design.
Xcode itself is simply monstrous to deal with. Not monstrous as in big and bad-ass cool. Monstrous as in a big, mean, people-eating monster that's hairy and bad-tempered. Xcode is going to take a while to get used to. After checking out a few "Hello World!" tutorials, I think it would be better to have a "F***-off World!" tutorial because that's what it feels like. Coming from Visual Studio, Xcode is simply not fun. Sigh... I guess I've got one nasty monster of a learning curve. From what I've read, everyone that first looks at Xcode HATES it with a passion, but those that have been there say that it's either do it the "Apple" way, or take the highway. No real choice. Xcode or nothing. Sigh...
The Finder application isn't very friendly either. I have yet to figure out how to browse up in the hierarchy to a parent folder. It's nothing like any file system explorer in other operating systems.
Installing software doesn't seem to be very intuitive. You don't get shortcuts easily available to you like you do in Windows. Instead, you need to go hunting through the hard disk (with no real ability to go up a level other than going "back") to find the program. Well, at least for Xcode anyways.
Checking through some of the installed software... Sigh... How did Yahoo crap get in there? Sigh... More bundling nonsense. But at least Python is installed. That's good. It also looks like there's a good set of other software installed, mostly media and Internet applications though. the PhotoBooth program seems pretty cool.
Shutting down applications seems a bit odd, and the the "X" button only minimizes the application instead of closing it, and they need to be closed from the dock. A small annoyance I suppose. Some applications have no way to close them except by figuring out where they are then closing them. e.g. PhotoBooth can launch iChat, but if you need to setup iChat, there's no way to close it except through the dock. Stranger yet, the "X" closed PhotoBooth, unlike other applications. Same for iPhoto. Hmmm... Just like Transformers, there's more than meets the eye here! :)
So far, while there are a lot of very nice things in OS X, I don't see how it is really all that much nicer to use than most Linux distributions. SuSe is easier. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are easier. Englightenment for Mandrake 10 years ago was very different than anything else, and was still easier than OS X.
But, that's from just seeing things for 1 day. I may well change my mind later. I suppose there's a learning curve. But I did learn Windows in Korean, and not English, and it seemed to be easier then. Meh... We'll see...
There are quite a few differences between OS X and other Unix-based systems, so I supposed it's just a matter of figuring some out.
Cheers,
Ryan