It turns almost one week now that I am using Mac OS X on my new mac book pro. So it’s time for a second impression – and surprisingly this is not too far away from the first impression ;-).
The look and feel on OS X is great. There are shadowed windows, smoothed fonts, nifty effects when minimizing/maximizing window and transparent windows (especially for the Terminal application this looks quite good). Also to mention is the Dashboard, a collection of small applications for different types of information you want to have hands on from time to time. You can configure the desktop, so that the dashboard is displayed when you drag the mouse to a certain corner. For me it’s the upper right corner. Then, the entire screen gets darker and all the dashboard widgets (that’s how they call the small info applications) are displayed. I have configured the dashboard to show the calculator, a German<->English dictionary, a weather forecast for Munich, the clock, a small iTunes player and a currency converter. There are hundreds of extra widgets available on the apple software pages. Another great visual and useful effect is the fast window switcher, which can be configured for another corner of the desktop. It fades in all the windows that are currently on the desktop side by side and lets you select one. The one you select is displayed in front of all others and gets the focus. Very useful if you have lots of applications open, which are not minimized to the dock and you start to loose the overview. The “show desktop” gadget fades out all the open windows and presents you the desktop… also nice to watch, but nothing I desperately needed so far.
In general, there are (at least) two ways of running applications on OS X. First there is a thing called Carbon, which is essentially the way, native Mac applications work. You have the menu bar for every application on top of the screen, which is a bit unusual for a Windows/Linux switcher, but after some hours or minutes you get used to it. The applications use the native language settings & theme, and integrate perfectly into your desktop. The other way is to run apps on an (additionally installable) Xserver port. These are mostly native unix apps or open source packages you get elsewhere, that need an Xserver to run. When you open such an application, the Xserver is opened as well and always runs in the background. The menu bar for these apps are at the top of the window, like they are on Windows and Xwindows – so this is different from the usual way of Mac apps. It’s a bid sad to have two different ways… anyway, at least it is possible to run a great range of applications that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to at all. By the way, MATLAB also runs on the Xserver port (but hopefully we will have a native version at some point in the future).
I am mostly an office user now. It is important for me to have an office package that let’s me exchange files with Microsoft office, so OpenOffice.org comes into the game. Unfortunately the native OpenOffice is not ported to Carbon and runs as an Xserver application. But fortunately, some guys took the sourcecode of OOo and the time to develop NeoOffice, a complete – although beta – port of OOo to Carbon. Thanks a lot for this.
There are two things that are not good. I thought before that this Mac OS is not perfect, and it is confirmed now. The first thing is the position of the windows controls, close, minimize/maximize buttons. They are on the left side and reverse order. The reverse order is not the problem, but in my opinion the left side is. I am right handed, so I put everything that I often need to access on the right side, and I expect things I often use to be on the right side. It is a very big and uncomfortable switch to have the major controls for applications on the left side, and I don’t like this. Probably I can not do anything against it – but if and someone reads this, please let me know how. The second thing is about menu languages. I used DeLocalizer to clean out localization files that I don’t need… and accidently deleted the German l10n as well. Then, all the menus appeared in English… usually not a real problem but annoying. I reinstalled the German l10n files again from the install CD and managed to get most of the German menus back – but the Systems menu refuses to appear in German, and so do the menus of some (not all) apps, e.g. the Mail application. I keep telling the system to change it’s language via the system preferences dialog->International, but it does not work. A call to the support center revealed that they want me to reinstall everything. Are they grazy? I don’t want to reinstall everything, just to get a German menu! Now I changed completely to English, until I find a way to change it back to German. Again, if someone who reads this knows how to cope with that issue – please let me know.
Update: Just called Apple support to help me with this l10n question. I thought, sure you can expect competent persons there, who know in which of the damn preferences files you have to write the language, that the systems menu should use… Well, to make it short – forget it. The guy who I spoke to wasn’t nearly as competent as I’d expect and even worse, he was in addition unfriendly and arrogant. He told me I should be in front of my laptop, but why?! He doesn’t see it anyway and I just want to get an answer to my question about which file to edit for setting the sytem menu language! Silly guy, really. I don’t want to lump them all together, but this is a rather bad experience. Hopefully I never leave such an impression with my customers!
To summarize this up: Forget Apple technical support! Don’t buy Apple care, it’s probably not worth the money. But please leave me a comment if you had positive experiences with these guys – I am open to change my mind. Of course I am happy with agreement comments too…
