I am a Mac Virgin - Day 1: Things that go click!

So my desk now looks like this.



Yes, I took the dive and became a fanboy. I can honestly say that I've never used OS X before or owned a Mac, so when I say that I'm new to this stuff I'm serious.

And because I'm serious I have to blog about it.

Thus, this week will document my first few days with OS X and my iMac. I've been using Windows for as long as I can remember so I was pretty surprised that I dropped the cash on something I've never actually had any experience with.

So where to start?

How about with these. They're the first thing that comes out of the box and seem familiar enough.

Contrary to popular belief there is some setup that you need to do (other than plugging the one cable in) because Justin Long doesn't actually come over to your house to show you how to make love to a mac. So the OS X tells you to turn the mouse and keyboard on, type in your name and then you're off to the races.

After the default setup and registration, OS X automatically installs some updates and I decide to surf the web in Safari. This is where things started to fall apart.

Just to give you a little background, I exploit use people computers for a living so I'm not exactly in the same category as your Grandma or even the guy trying to sell you a PC at Future Shop. I'm straight up better than them and have great hair. I use Linux on a pretty regular basis so OS X seems pretty similar and I somehow convince myself that I can handle this.

But where it all went wrong is with this thing: the keyboard - Have a good look at it.

My first concern with it was whether or not those tiny arrow keys were going to affect my Tetris play. But I soon found out that Tetris would be the least of my worries.

Let me tell you that I'm all about shortcuts and jumping around the places with both hands on the keyboard but the shortcuts are different. Real different. You would be surprised with all the shortcuts you don't know about in Windows.

Have a good look at the keyboard again, there are a lot of buttons missing. fn + control + option + command, what are those? I tried to substitute the full keyboard but they don't do that at the Apple Store (but you can do it online).

For example, where the backspace button is there's a button that say delete. You press it and what does it do? It deletes one space backwards. But I want to suck characters into the cursor like in Windows. You know what that command for that is? fn + delete.

And you know jumping back and forth between words highlighting them? Well that's shift + option + arrow.

Since there's no home/end button you use command + left/right for that too. Page up/down work the same way as well.

For a guy who's so used to Windows keyboard and automatically reaches for certain keys it seems that I have to get comfortable with this new one because my typing has gone to shit and learn some serious shortcuts. I need to learn how to max/minimize, tile and if possible snap application windows to the edges of the screen ASAP. I use a laptop at work and an ergonomic keyboard at home and this thing feels much different from either of them.

Where I did not find any trouble was with the Magic Mouse. While using something like a deck of cards for a mouse seems counter intuitive it's actually pretty swell.

Unless you've been eating honey garlic wings the whole touch sensitive mouse thing works out pretty well. I did have to enable right click though because for some reason its off by default but I have no problems with this thing. To tell you the truth it actually seemed pretty awkward out of the box but the more I use it the more comfortable it gets.

I'm still trying to figure out whether of input devices is giving me carpal tunnel syndrome and the idea of switching back to my trustworthy mouse and keyboard has crossed my mind a couple times, but I'm resisting.

On the other hand Expose is pretty cool and I now have like 4802830% more desk space.

Things seem good so far.