Hello everybody out there! About two weeks ago, I bought my very first MacBook. It’s not much better than my old VAIO Z, hardware-wise. But man, can it work.
The OSX runs in about twenty seconds and the logon process takes about 5 seconds (compare it to a 95 second startup time on Windows 7).
After the initial confusion of finding my way around, everything was a piece of cake. After only three hours, I had said goodbye to my old VAIO Z. For nearly any application I had on my Windows, there is a – sometimes better – replacement for my Mac. More than that, I now have the luxury of enjoying a native Persian calendar, the lack of which I always felt on Windows
Everything looks perfect and elegant. At 2kg – about 500g heavier than Z – it’s just barely heavy enough to make me notice the weight.
What I have installed on the OS include:
- calibre; to manage my eBooks and also to have something to work with my Nook. Also, the interface was familiar since I had used it on my Windows already. The real disappointment here, was that I couldn’t satisfactorily manage my eBooks’ collection with iTunes. I liked the interface very much, however I couldn’t get it to work with the Nook as well as I wanted to.
- IntelliJ IDEA; currently my favorite IDE for developing anything, from C to enterprise Java applications.
- MacJournal; the all powerful note-taking, document-organizing, blog client, etc. that I use right now. This post is written in MacJournal by the way. Up until this very moment, I think I like it.
- Nambu; for tweeting madly day and night.
- Firefox; my browser of choice for the moment, since I couldn’t find anything like Foxyproxy for Safari.
- Skype; no comments here, I gather.
- VLC; the awesome all purpose multimedia player. The only thing lacking a bit for me is the fuzziness of videos for my RMVB videos.
- Vuze; the great, cross-platform Bittorrent client, written in Java.
- Keka; the very cool compression utility capable of decompressing GZip, BZip, 7zip, RAR, etc., developed on top of 7zip.
- JDiskReport; since I am a hard disk usage nerd. It provides me with excellent, detailed reports of exactly how I have used my hard disk.
Also, I have come to believe that Mac is all about integration. I am now enjoying a level of integration and cooperation of applications I never had experienced before. My iPhoto, Address Book, Mail, and Skype are inter-connected. I can sync my Nokia E52 mobile phone with my Mac as easily as I would take a look at it. And it’s just the beginning.
Well, I guess that’s all for now. Have a good time folks.