Friday, May 08, 2009

Getting comfortable at home

The new iMac computer is working great and it is almost fully set up.  It will take significant time to get really familiar with it, though.

The computer came with Korean instructions in hard copy although it was easy to set it to operate in English (or Korean).  I downloaded some manuals but I feel I am still missing stuff.  When I first set the computer up, I was surprised at having only four USB ports and a short cord for the mouse.  It seemed damn inconvenient although serviceable.  I received help partitioning the drive and in doing so, saw the serviceman plug the mouse into the keyboard.  Turns out the keyboard has two USB ports built in.

Am I just unobservant or was that tidbit included in the Korean instructions?

The computer looks great on my desk.  The CPU and hard drive and all that are built into the monitor.  The keyboard is notebook sized or possibly even smaller.  combined, I have more desk space with the desk top than I did with the notebook.  I am no longer balancing textbooks on open drawers or pulling kitchen chairs close to pile needed materials on.

Everything is backwards or, at least, turned 90 degrees, on the iMac.  The on/off and other controls are on the upper left, instead of the bottom left.  To close a window (can I still use that word?), I click on an icon at the upper-left instead of the upper-right.  The tabbed pages in Safari close on the left side rather than Firefox's right side. ...

I can't compare Apple with Windows because my closest comparison is the old and slowly failing notebook, which I will continue to use a great deal until this semester finishes.  The features on this iMac blow the notebook away but Vista might do the same.

The trick is not to think outside the Microsoft box, but ignore that box even exists.  There are a lot of similarities (Safari and the newest Explorer both look a lot like Firefox) but the key is results and not how the two paths are different.  Hmm, paths and boxes -mixed metaphors, I guess.

3 comments:

Marcus Peddle said...

I am very interested in reading more about your Mac experience. I suspect you will be objective about it. Many people are either love or hate about Windows / Mac.

kwandongbrian said...

Well, thanks, Marcus.

I certainly do love it, but partially in a it's-a-new-computer way, rather than it's-an-apple way. I mean the screen is so much bigger that I have room to run two applications literally side-by-side, which I could never do on the notebook.

With the Windows computers, there was common knowledge floating around for most people - I remember helping a coworker with basic arithmetic in Excel as he didn't know the cells could perform any tasks; he thought they just organized the information.

I hope to find a similar source of information for the iMac. There should be a shortcut to copy-n-paste as there is in Windows. Once you start using CNTL -C and CNTL-V, it's hard to go to back to the 'edit' tab and selecting 'copy' from the menu; but that is what I now do.

PAKA said...

i'm still trying to figure things on my macbook.