The Mac OSX Experience - Day 1

Since I've opened up the new MacBook Pro and started getting it working right. I have a lot of work to do on it.

Now I want to state for the record that I hate Mac bigots. These are the Mac people who are always slamming Windows, telling everyone how perfect Macs are, and looking down at us non-Mac people with distain. I've been working on computers for almost 30 years now. I know that non are perfect. I feel sorry for these Mac bigots. They remind me of cult members who simply can't open their minds up enough to see the real world.

So it has been a day of working on the Mac. For those who claims that Mac's work perfectly out of the box, well they are lying. I've run into a lot of problems. It appears that I am really going to have to roll up my sleeves and dig deep into the OSX to figure out how to do what I need.

USB Thumb Drive Lock Up: My Macbook Pro locked up tighter than a drum when I plugged in one of my USB keys. I had to reboot. No error messages or anything. It just froze and stopped working. I took the key over to my WinXP laptop and reformatted it as FAT. Now the Mac will read it and not lock up.

No TrueCrypt: Damn! This is very disappointing. I love TrueCrypt. It use it to secure my USB keys incase I loose them. It turns out that there is no version of TrueCrypt that runs on a Mac. That means I can't use my TrueCrypt secured USB keys on the Mac.

I prefer TrueCrypt because it is open source public project with the best security and encryption methods. It is the only one that I ultimately trust. What is going on?

No Western Australia Daylight Savings Time Support: Hello Apple! What the hell is going on? Microsoft got right on the new DST for Western Australia. I noticed that Apple doesn't have it. Their advice? Tell your Mac that you are in Japan, or manually change your machine twice a year. Nice. How hard is it to update your clock files to support DST here?

No SpinRite: Another Damn! SpinRite is a critical program for the prevention of hard drive failures. It actually runs under FreeDOS. You have to boot a diskette, CD-ROM, or Thumbdrive with FreeDOS and SpinRite to get it started. I am seriously worried now. Running SpinRite on my drives allows me to sleep better knowing that the best program in the world has been watching them for problems.

No Java IDE: Hells Bells. It turns out that Sun doesn't make a Java compiler that runs under Mac OSX. They have them for most other OS's. Just not Mac. Why? Java is supposed to be a Write-Once, Run-Anywhere language. I use Sun's NetBeans IDE for Java development on my WinXP machine. But I can't use it on the Mac. I now have to learn a new IDE, Apples.

I blame this one on Sun, not Apple.

Firefox Profile Manager: Boy, Apple doesn't make it easy to customize the way programs start. I don't feel like learning a new browser. So I installed Firefox on the Mac. However, in order to start the Firefox Profile Manager, I have to drop into to Unix shell under MacOSX and manually enter the start line.

That is not that big of a deal. But what I can't do is then create a quick start icon under OSX that will fire off the Profile Manager for me. I can do this easily in Windows by editing the properties of a shortcut. No such animal on OSX that I can see. It tooks like I will need to spend a lot of time figuring out how I can tweak that command line parms that OSX passes to the underlying Unix system.

So in the meantime, I have to go through the profile manager everytime I start Firefox. I prefer to have it set up like I have on my WinXP box, when I go into the profile manager only when I need to.

Bootcamp: I downloaded and installed BootCamp from Apple in order to prepare my Macbook for dual boot. But after I run the install program, Bootcamp just goes away. It doesn't issue any messages that it is done. I finally figured out what it had done when I ran into Bootcamp hidden in the Utilities folder under the Applications folder.

Jeeze... you would like that the install program would at least tell you that it finished and to go find the app in that folder. Instead, it just disappears.

Quicktime Can't Play AVI files: This made me laugh. Mac bigots often speak of how Mac's run perfectly out of the box. Well, Apple's Quicktime video player can't play my AVI files. I had to go install the 3rd party player, VLC, which plays them fine. What is the computer idiot who bough a Mac cause they don't know computers supposed to do with stuff like this?

Adobe Bridge Tryout: Thanks Adobe! I downloaded and installed the Mac version of Photoshop CS2 Tryout version. It comes with Bridge, their image browsing product. But it won't run because of licensing restrictions. How in the hell am I supposed to "tryout" your product when your trial version won't let me?

This is stupid Adobe's fault, not Apple's.

Adobe Photoshop Tryout: Thanks again Adobe! The CS2 version of photoshop can't read Canon RAW files from my 30D. According to your website, CS2 has the Canon RAW support built in. But no..... it won't work. Nor can I find the RAW plug in to download and install after the fact. I want Photoshop CS2 software for RAW processing. That is what it is supposed to be able to do.

Grrrrr.

Font Problems: Oh man. This one sucks. I noticed that when I browse web sites with a lot of text (such as news sites), the top of some sentences get shaved off here and there. This is not good. I am going to have to do some testing and call Apple to solve this problem.