Well, it’s been a day, and my new MacBook Pro computer is still in existence on my desk, and hasn’t vanished back into some techie mirage.
Some first impressions:
coool!!!
One thing that Apple has done well for a long time is industrial design and marketing, and it shows. The “iSoftware” really does have an integrated togetherness to it: the DVD player works well with the remote, which also mutes iTunes when I want to make a phone call. It even synced with my BlueTooth cellphone!
And I really, really like the “two fingers on the trackpad to scroll” feature. That replaces the scroll button on a mouse completely for me. (The Mac recognised my Wacom drawing tablet as well!)
Ow, this keyboard is small
Being a portable, the keys are closer together than I’m used to, and I keep hitting the Caps Lock key when I’m not intending to. I keep wanting to delete forwards from the cursor as well, and I’m at a bit of a loss because I can’t remember how I did it ion the Windows machine. As it is, I have to Option-Shift-Right Arrow over the offending text to select it, then I can delete. It’s just a matter of getting used to a slightly-different way of doing things.
I’m getting used to the Option and Command (“Shreddie”) keys, but I notice that a Control key is still there, and I can use it to Ctrl-click on things to get a context menu.
Where are my programs?
I miss the Start menu, with its list of installed programs. But i am getting used to hittng Dock, Finder, Applications, then selecting the one I want to use. I did search for one at one point, though.
The Dock
Cute, especially when I set it to be small and expand the icon that the pointer is over. It seems to be about halfway between the Task Bar and the Quick Launch icons on Windows XP.
Free Stuff!
The machine came with thirty-day trial versions of various software, including IWork, which I do want to test. I have a presentation due in two weeks, and I was considering buying it. It’ll be good to see what it’s like.
I also downloaded OpenOffice for Mac OS X, and discovered that it’s an “X Window System” application that does not use the Mac’s own user interface. I had to install the Unix-style “X11” windowing system, which was provided as an optional piece of software on the OS X installation discs. Once installed and activated, OpenOffice placed its own menus and such in a MacOS window, and did not use the man Mac OS menu at the top of the screen.
The Chat Situation: Disappointing, so far
The machine came with iChat, and I was able to install Skype and MSN Messenger. Unfortunately, there seem to be no multinetwork IM clients such as Trillian; ICQ is unavailable; and the MSN Messenger client I got from Microsoft seems to be a couple of versions behind the one on XP. My friend on MSN was unable to open a video chat with me.
So… is there a way to make iChat work with other IM networks such as MSN, and especially ICQ? Most of my Esperanto buddies are on ICQ, and most of the rest of them are on MSN.
All Unixy underneath
It gave me a great deal of pleasure to open a terminal and see a genuine Unix-style prompt staring at me. ls -l and all that. 
Mail: What address am I using?
I’m sending email using the Mac’s inbuilt Mail program, and using the email address of my email account from my ISP. It was very fast in sorting the thousands of messages I had from 4 months of webmail access only!
I had been using Thunderbird on the XP machine, and sending mail with a Sender and Reply To address in my external domain. Mail addressed to that domain is forwarded to my mail account at my ISP; this allows me to change ISPs without changing the email address that everyone sees, which has already happened once.
Can I configure the Mail program to send using a different Sender and Reply-To address?
I have much to learn.