iSwitched
25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Apple | 0 Comments
Some of you have already asked me about how the PowerBook feels, and also to post some screenshots of the thingie and OS X. Here you are, hope you like it
The first thing that impressed me when I got rid of the carton box in which the main package was the design of the box. Apple style, I'd say. Black, with a nice picture of the PowerBook on top. Once you open it, there is a white cover with a little grey apple of the left and "Designed by Apple in California":
In the package I found the installation DVD, several cables such as a phone cable, a DVI to VGA adapter, the AC adapters, several thin manuals and of course, the computer itself
The PowerBook is a very elegant machine. It's made of Aluminum (the previous series of PowerBooks were made of Titanium) and indeed it has a metalic feeling and at first sight, it also feels very sturdy, resistant. Obviously I am not going to make any tests to confirm this feeling! Also, to make the branding more obvious, Apple included its own apple logo that lights up on the lid... yes, it has its own light and it lights up when you turn the computer on:
On the outside we can also find all the different external connections that the laptop has, but they're on both sides, so there's nothing on the back side (basically because the screen hinge takes the whole back side) The PowerBook series have the following connections:
- 2 USB 2.0 ports
- DVI output (you need the DVI-to-VGA adapter therefore to connect the laptop to a normal monitor)
- 1 FireWire 400 port
- 1 Firewire 800 port
- S-Video TV-out
- 1 Ethernet port (10/100/1000 Mbits)
- 1 PC Card slot
- Audio in and audio out ports
- Modem
The screen measures 15" diagonally, but unlike the common screens in modern PC-based laptops, the PowerBook screen was designed to be panoramic. That is, it is much wider than taller. The first impression is a bit strange, also because we have so much more horizontal screen space than vertical. The maximum resolution that this screen can reach is 1280x854, which is not as high as the 1400x1050 that most PC laptops get but in my opinion it is enough and text does not look as small compared to PC laptops. The screen looks very nice and bright, and it looks like there are no traces (yet) of the dreaded white spots on the screen. I asked the Apple person to whom I spoke when I bought this PowerBook and he said, kind of reluctantly when I asked about this issue, that they had not had any case related to that for the last few months just after Apple dumped the provider of the faulty screens. As far as I know, Apple is using now a completely different provider of laptop screens, so I hope my PowerBook has the good screen and not the bad one
All in all, the hardware looks very nice. It does not try to be as flashy and spectacular as some of the newest PC from brands like Dell or Hewlett-Packard, with hundreds of stupid purple and orange LEDs all over the laptop. The PowerBook does not have any LED at all on it, except one but it only turns on when the laptop is in "Stand By" mode. It is a little white LED the size of half a little finger and it is located on the left side of the button that releases the lid. It looks so cool
And speaking of cool things, I think one of the coolest things of this laptop is the light under the keyboard: the laptop has a light sensor that, upon detecting a lack of external light, will enable a very light blue light under the keyboard so that it is easier to locate all the keys... Maybe it's not that useful if you think about it but it really is a cool demo when you want to show off a little When I first turned it on, I was a bit scared because I had never used an Apple laptop. It makes hardly any sound and it plays a short but nice sound. The screen remains black (this is where I got scared, because the screen was completely black and there was no sign of life at all!) and we don't get to see all those self tests that PC BIOSes run. The machine boots straight away in graphical mode and the first thing we see is a screen with a grey background with the Apple logo in the mide and a smaller kind of clock spinning. A few seconds later, I was greeted with some kind of post-installation screen where I selected my language, time zone, and where I created my first user:
Moments later, I was already playing with Mac OS X. I remember that my first impression was something like "Holy shit!"
When you first boot, the desktop looks very nice and polished. The Dock has already been populated with some applications and there is only one icon on the desktop, an icon pointing to the root of the filesystem in case you need it. It didn't take me long to get familiar with the preferences panel and some time later, I had already customized the desktop to suit my taste:
The first thing you notice on the desktop is the Dock. The Dock was inherited from the NeXT operating system and tries to be an application launcher and a task bar at the same time. I had heard a lot of bad criticism about the Dock (mostly from old pre-OS X users) but I don't think it's that bad once you get used to it. The only problem I have with it is that its size varies according to how many applications you have running at the moment. It annoys me still a little in the sense that icons are not always in the same place when you look for them... Also the trashcan icon is not on the desktop but in the Dock, and even though its position can't vary much, you'll find it at different positions of the bottom right edge of the screen while you start and close applications.
The Dock also has two little details that really got my attention and speak of the attention to detail that Apple has with its software:
In the first image, the mail application is telling me via its icon that I have 5 unread messages in my Inbox. In the second one, you can see that minimized applications show a live thumbnail of its window, with its own icon displayed at a much smaller size on the bottom right corner. The size of the thumbnail will depend on the size of our Dock but even at small sizes it is quite easy to differentiate applications. As I said, this is a "live" thumbnail so for example if we have a terminal minimized and it's running some kind of non-interactive process that it's outputting information to the screen, the thumbnail will reflect that and will keep updating itself. Again, that's sooo cool!
The Dock also has magnification (icons become bigger when the mouse pointer is over them) but I didn't like it very much because making an icon bigger means again, resizing the whole Dock. I used magnification in the screenshots above to make my point clear, but you don't really need it anyway.The second component of the Mac OS X desktop is the Finder. The Finder acts as the file manager of the system, and it also uses this metallic look. The first impression is that it is a very simple application that does not do much. I mean, look at its toolbar!
But then your start falling in love with its speed and its shortcuts, and the left column, with the quick access links, is also very handy. I was a little bit afraid of the Finder because I knew that Apple had decided to use the 3-column mode from the old NeXT file manager, where the contets of the different folders are laid out in adjacent columns instead of a tree or the more traditional "spatial" mode. For some reason, whenever I tried some application in Linux using that style, I did not like it all, but this time, it was different:
I like this mode because it is easier to see how deep we are and how folders have been organized. At a glance, we can have an idea of how things look like three levels up... However, if you don't still feel comfortable with this mode, the Finder also supports the more traditional "spatial" mode where one window equals one folder:
It has a third mode which shows files in a list with more information such as size, permissions, etc but the spatial and the 3-column mode in my opinion are the most interesting ones.
Another thing I love from the OS X desktop is ExposÈ. It is one of those things that are difficult to explain but when you see it working, you wonder how you managed to work without it so far. It is not a lifesaver but it will definitely make your tasks easier when working with a lot of windows. Just by clickin the assigned combination of keys (it is customizable), all our windows in our desktop will shrink and wil be arranged so that they can all be seen at the same time. Once all the windows have been laid out in a smaller size, we only have to pick the one we need and they will all go back to their original size and position:
In this example, you can see that all the windows on my desktop have shrunk and they can all be seen at the same time. In this case they didn't have to shrink so much because there were only 5 windows so not so much space was needed.. After positioning my mouse on the one I wanted, I clicked the left mouse button and that precise window was brought to the front, while all the others recovered their original size and position but stayed in the background. The cool thing of ExposÈ is that you can use one of the mouse buttons to trigger is so that it is always at hand. For example in my case, I have configured ExposÈ to the combination Command-Right Mouse Button, and it works great. Other than ExposÈ, OS X 10.3 also brought the Alt-Tab (here it is Command-Tab) combination from the Windows world. Pressing it, we will get something like the picture below in the middle of our screen, showing the icons of the applications that we have already running.
I think it's enough for today. I have so many more good things to tell about OS X that if I kept writing now, I would still be here for the next 4 hours...
I also have a few bad things to tell because OS X also has its fair share of not so nice things. Stay tuned