Mac, Take 2
by Bruce Ure at 10:25 05/06/06 (Blogs::Bruce)
Despite my deep-seated belief that Macs are overhyped, overpriced and over here, I have taken the plunge once more by the acquisition of an incredibly sexy Mac Mini.
This may illustrate several things:

I hate Microsoft so much I'm prepared to try a Mac again even after a disastrous foray into the world of Powerbooks.

I get bored easily.

It's possible I didn't try hard enough before.

I want a PVR solution and I so bady don't want to build it with Windows. Besides, the remote that comes with the Mac Mini to drive Front Row is so sexy it's almost worth the price tag of the entre computer on its own. I thought it was a complimentary ipod Shuffle when it fell out of the box.

And there we have it. So far I'm already happier with the sensible keyboard of a proper Mac than I was with the daftly-designed Powerbook keyboard (and don't get me onto that sodding can't-override-sleep-when-closed 'feature'), and this one also seems much more responsive, but then with an Intel dual core wossname instead of a primitive G4 you might expect that, even though this one has half the memory.

The only two irritations so far encountered apart from the usual at-sign-double-quotes layout abomination, and the weird text selection keys, are not being able to use the same shortcut to go to the Firefox address bar (Windows' alt-D), which is admittedly extremely minor, and the fact that when you copy (or move) a folder into a folder where there is already a folder of that name, it DELETES the destination folder before copy/moving the new one, rather than MERGE them which is what I was expecting to happen. Is it purely my Windows background that makes me think merge is a much more sensible option?

OK, perhaps I should have finished reading the message that began something like "This folder already contains a folder called that. Do you want to " before pressing whatever I pressed, but hey.

Actually three irritations, and this one's pretty major. If I go to Network I can see my windows machines, but if I double-click them despite authenticating with known-good user/pass, I get the ubiquitous (everyone else with a windows box and a mac seems to have this issue) message "The alias 'whatever' could not be opened because the original item can not be found'".

Well YOU PUT IT THERE, why can't you find it??

Hang on, actually 4 irritations. The mouse acceleration profile is all wrong. Same mouse as Windows machines (MS - actually their mice are damn good), same manufacturer's drivers (MS), different acceleration. Slow/tiny cursor movements are much more laboured, need much bigger movements of the mouse. Very annoying, and there seems to be nothing I can do about it except get used to it. I've tweaked the mouse settings and increasing the sensitivity high enough that small movements react quicker makes it far too sensitive for big movements. Ho hum.

I've actually seen this behaviour on other mice on Windows machines, but not been able to pin it down to anything in particular, just a vague feeling that it's to do with "acceleration".

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