Been exclusively using Apple products for my computing needs for 3 months now and figured it was time for a recap to discuss what I’ve liked and disliked thus far.
Likes
I’m still loving the ease of use and especially loving the way all of the devices work together and how I can jump on my iMac or either of the MacBook Air’s in the house and have the same keyboard as well as mouse gestures (note, I have the Magic Trackpad instead of the Magic Mouse for my iMac). Upgrading to iOS6 was absolutely a game changer for me. Having notes and reminders synchronized wireless (and fast as hell) has aided me well. Upgrading to Mountain Lion, albeit somewhat uneventful was a breeze for the most part (more on the lesser part in a moment) and interacting with Apple over my daughter’s erroneous Zynga in-app purchases was a breath of fresh air considering what I read online (spoiler, they refunded the 120$ in charges without any fuss and now I have to enter my password in for every single purchase made). Something subtle that’s been a major improvement over gnome-terminal is OSX’s Terminal and iTerm’s (my terminal of choice) reformatting the console output when you resize the window or change the font size. Back in my Linux days I’d have to rerun a command to get the display to fit correctly after I’d resize, not a major deal but great to not have to do that any longer.
Dislikes
I mentioned previously that I got my system set up for web development using Homebrew and that’s all worked out well. What hasn’t worked out well is that it seems like after every OSX upgrade (small or larger) Homebrew gets borked and I end up needing to reinstall Xcode or the Command Line Tools that is part of Xcode. Now that I know the drill, this is a minor waste of time at most. Other than that, my only other issue has been with the App Store. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the App Store, but I’ve been finding it hard to determine which is the best app for me. Often times I’m running into a page of search results and the bulk of the apps have little to no ratings. Just makes it a bit difficult when you’re not overly familiar with the apps to begin with.
Somewhat Indifferent
Just like I hating running GNOME apps in KDE and vise versa, I’m not a fan of running X11 apps in OSX (never have been). Up until recently, I was still running GiMP and Inkscape in X11 for my image editing and vector needs. The biggest struggle was the fact that those apps rely heavily on CTRL+? whereas OSX relies heavily on CMD+?. This ultimately led me down the path to getting a subscription for the Adobe Creative Cloud and called it a day. I’ll probably have a critique of Photoshop and Illustrator in the near future as they are very usable, but there’s quite a few things that the Open Source equivalents do better.
