I got my 12″ iBook. Since Thursday. And I love it.
I don’t think I’m going to do a full review, as I’ve got too much homework to do and studying to think about starting, even if it is the holidays. I’m just going to record some of my thoughts here.
The iBook itself is a work of art. It’s cute, but manages to stay elegant. Although I like the styling of the powerbooks more, I can see why many like the iBook. It’s thin and light - and they’ve managed to stuff a hot g4 processor inside without serious overheating issues. It’s white, a perfect complement to the pearly ‘i’ line. And it’s chock-full of features at a cheap price - it’s got bluetooth, WiFi (”Airport”), and a sexy slot-loading combo drive. There’s a problem, though, it’s inevitably going to get scratched real bad. To alleviate this, I bought a spongey case for padded protection. But when the iBook really shines is when it’s on.
Sure, mac OS X is nice. Beautiful, in fact. And for all those rare times I had using OS X on various peoples’ iBooks/PB’s, I had never thought I would become addicted to it once I had a ‘big cat’ of my own. Maybe I’m cheating a little, but I took no time to get used to Tiger’s interface - it just felt so natural, and within a day I can do complex system tasks, all without looking at the manual. I guess all the time mucking around on others’ macs wasn’t put to waste.
OS X represents GNOME done right. It’s elegant, intuitive, fast, and all those subtle effects really get to you. And it’s powerful - after all, it’s built on BSD. The only gripes I have are that folder view settings could be a little easier to configure and more flexible, and that multitasking could be improved somewhat - the dock doesn’t take to massive window porn. Expose helps alot, though, and that’s one feature OS X can’t live without.
Well, after using my mac for only a day or two, I’ve already installed quite a lot of stuff. Here are some useful free programs I found.
TigerLaunch - This is a small app launcher that sits as an icon in the top bar. It automatically scan your Apps folder and adds all your apps to its drop-down launch list. Very nifty, and you can select which apps you want showing up in the list.
Shiira - Safari’s a good web browser and all, but Shiira’s better. It’s got most of the useful features of Safari, and then some of it’s own. The main attration is its ‘tab expose’ which works just lke OS X’s one, except for all open tabs in this light little browser. There are also page transition effects, which mimic turning a page in a book whicle you surf, but it’s too laggy to use on an iBook. It’s built on Apple’s WebKit, so it renders pages exactly the same as Safari does, but much faster.
Mercury MSN - Named after the messenger of the gods, mercury is a IM client that connects to the MSN protocol. MSN Messenger for Mac 5.0 is a big improvement from 4, but it still lacks too many features compared to its Windows counterpart. Mercury tries to put these features back in the mac with its Java-based program. I use this primarily for webcam chat. The interface is not very professionally done, so it gets quite confusing to use. That’s why I still use MSN Messenger for normal chat.
