Apple User

2003-08-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

Laptop or Desktop?
The original idea for my iBook was for it to be a mobile machine to supplement my desktop PC. However, for two days now my desktop PC has remained switched off and I am typing this on an external keyboard and reading it on my normal LG monitor. I have several external devices plugged in via a USB hub and my iBook is currently effectively acting as my desktop machine. Apart from Windows development work I'm not sure that XP will be used an awful lot from now on.

Now, if only I could convince my wife that a new Power Mac G5 with a 21" widescreen monitor was a necessity ...

2003-08-18T16:34:00.000-07:00

Backing Up
As a long-time computer user I have always been more than aware of the importance of backing up data on a regular basis. Therefore when I got my iBook one of my initial thoughts was about how I would backup the hard disk in a reliable and regular manner. I considered burning data to a set of CDs and I also considered buying an enternal DVD writer but I finally settled on the idea of getting an external hard disk and using that. This would also offer me the opportunity to store additional data such as MP3 files and perhaps even have a common drive to share between my PC and my iBook. As a result I bought a LaCie 80GB external FireWire drive (http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?id=10022).

The next task was to find some backup software and here I was faced with two real options. I could either use a tool which would backup specific files and folders or I could use a tool which would create an image of my hard disk. The second solution would involve a lengthier backup process but it would at least allow me to boot from the backup hard disk if my laptop suffered a catastrophic failure. Some research on the web led me to Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html) which really is an excellent, easy to use but very powerful application.

After setting up the external hard disk (a simple case of partitioning it into two, one half for backups and one half for data) I started Carbon Copy Cloner and within a few seconds had it working away producing a bootable image of my iBook's hard disk. A few minutes later and the whole process had been completed and was very straightforward and painless.

2003-08-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

Software Roundup
One area that I have yet to touch is that of what software I have installed on my iBook and how I am getting on in my transition from Windows to OS X. I plan to mention new applications as and when I come across them and try them out but for now I will post a quick list of what software I am using on a daily basis.

Safari (http://www.apple.com/safari/)
My preferred Windows web browser was Opera but I had heard bad things about Opera 6 for OS X. However, and rather fortunately, just about the time I got my iBook Apple's own web browser, Safari, left beta and was released as version 1.0. I have been using it as my primary web browser and I have to say that I am impressed with both its speed and stability. A few web sites seem to dislike it but these are the typical "if you're not using Internet Explorer you're not coming in" type. My bank, Abbey National, complains but lets me log in to their eBanking service but why web development companies assume that everyone uses or should use Internet Explorer is beyond me.

Mail (http://www.apple.com/)
Mail is Apple's standard email client and it has proven to be a very capable replacement for Outlook 2000. I even managed to transfer all of my Outlook emails and their attachments over to my iBook (details will be given in my upcoming notes about migrating data from Windows to OS X). Mail can handle numerous accounts, mail servers and allows mail-handling rules to be created all of which I needed but, as a bonus, incoming, outgoing, draft and sent mails are all stored in their own folders automatically which is something that I had to achieve in Outlook using a number of rules.

Moneydance (http://www.moneydance.com)
I used to use a fantastic application called RMRBank (http://www.rmrsoft.com/epoc/bank.htm) on my Psion netBook to manage my finances. I was never happy with either Microsoft Money or Quicken and therefore this was one of the core applications that kept me using my netBook on a daily basis. However, when I decided to migrate to an iBook I made a concerted effort to find a replacement application and I found Moneydance. This is actually a Java application and it will therefore work on several operating systems including Windows and I am just sad that I didn't find it sooner.

Office X (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/)
My work as a Visual Basic developer involves a lot of document sharing with colleagues. As almost all of the documents are Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel files I needed to ensure that I could both open and read them and also save them in a suitable format. Appleworks seems to have some success in this area but I was advised that if the documents were complex (and many of them are) then I would be better buying a copy of Office X which allows for pretty much perfect document handling and file format compatibility.

Palm Synchronisation (http://www.palm.com/us/macintosh/)
Being able to synchronise my Palm with my iBook is very important to me, as is the ability to install new applications and use some third-party desktop applications. Fortunately Palm produce an OS X version of their Desktop software and most of the Palm applications that I use that had a Windows companion application also have a Mac equivalent. In fact, only one or two applications have let me down so far but more on that shortly.

2003-08-17T15:09:00.000-07:00

Sleep or Shut Down When Travelling
Someone recently asked me if an iBook can be carried around safely when it is asleep or whether it is a better idea to shut it down. I wasn’t sure what the right answer was but various posting in the newsgroups and in discussion forums pointed to the fact that it is perfectly safe to take an iBook out and about when it is asleep since the hard disk is safely parked and therefore should not come to any harm.

Theory is fine but actual practice is better and so when my wife took me away for a surprise break this weekend I decided to bite the bullet and only put my iBook to sleep before packing it in a bag and taking it along with us. After three hours of my driving (which is a pretty good test of how the iBook would handle being bounced and generally thrown around) I opened the lid to see it wake up instantly and find that all was well. I am happy to report that the return journey was also survived without problems so I can now say that I am happy to travel with my iBook when it is asleep rather than being shut down.

2003-08-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

Introduction
A couple of weeks ago I bought myself an Apple iBook. This was my first ever contact with an Apple machine and my reasons for getting one are perhaps not as usual as that of most people. After all, I have been using versions of Microsoft Windows since around 1994 and my job as a Visual Basic developer means that I cannot simply abandon Windows and move on to an alternative operating system. In fact the impetus to buy myself an Apple laptop came from dissatisfaction with my Psion netBook …

Mobile Computing
Since the mid-1990s I have been using Psion handheld computers for my mobile computing needs. These devices are simply wonderful and the last devices made (Psion withdrew from the consumer PDA arena a couple of years ago) consisted of a rock-solid operating system, feature-rich built-in applications and excellent hardware (not many people can make a pocketable machine whose keyboard is good enough to touch type on). Sadly the smaller machines were stuck with greyscale screens, limited networking abilities (no bluetooth, WiFi or Ethernet) and a dying developer base and for this reason I moved on to Palms for my day-to-day PDA needs (I currently use a Palm Tungsten T).

However I also owned a Psion netBook which can essentially be described as a sub-laptop with an excellent keyboard, great battery life (around 8 hours), a colour, touch-sensitive VGA screen, WiFi support, limited Ethernet capabilities and instant-on. This device was perfect for carrying around in a bag or briefcase for emailing, web browsing, writing documents, playing the odd game, managing personal accounts and much more. However, as time moves on I found myself more and more limited by my netBook and I found myself having to limit myself to doing what the netBook could cope with rather than being able to do what I really wanted and needed to do.

- Although the keyboard is great the screen is not and it only supports a resolution of 800x600. In addition it is pretty much unusable outside since bright sunlight makes the screen very hard to use.
- A Psion source confirmed that bluetooth would never make it onto the netBook which was not great news since I would have loved to be able to send and receive emails and SMSs without having to line my mobile phone up with the netBook. In addition, it was confirmed that the netBook’s operating system had reached the end of its life as far as Psion was concerned and that there most likely would not be any new versions of the operating system and hence any remaining bugs and issues are now there for life.
- The Opera web browser is very buggy and has problems with several sites and really didn't offer me a good web browsing experience. Other people might find it fine but I just found it frustrating and limiting. Opera also confirmed that development of Opera for Psion has ceased so the bugs and problems are here to stay.
- The exodus of many software authors is not a problem in that there is a very good library of software available but many authors are unwilling (or unable) to continue work on their software. Suggestions for changes to shareware applications generally fell on deaf ears where a couple of years ago they would have been implemented within weeks if not days or even hours and development of on-board conversion software that allowed Psion’s proprietary file formats to be converted to and from Microsoft’s proprietary formats seems to have been abandoned just before it became truly useful and usable.

I loved having a mobile machine that was not a full-sized, heavy, battery sucking monster but the netBook was no longer it.

Looking Around
More out of curiosity I decided to look into alternatives to the netBook that would be more suited to my needs. I didn't need a PDA replacement since I am happy with my Palm and a netBook replacement wouldn't be carried with me everywhere (my netBook mostly lives on my desk next to my PC) but I did want:
- Instant-on if possible (being able to switch on, connect to the internet, collect emails and look things up on the web and then close-down quickly).
- Good battery life.
- Good software library, including personal banking, word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing, newsgroup access and instant messengers.
- Cost effective.
- Good community support.
- Bluetooth and WiFi support.
- Stable operating system.
- Direct synchronisation with my Palm.

My initial thoughts were to look at the smaller Windows laptops since I am a heavy Windows user. However, the smaller and lighter they get the more expensive they are and a reasonably sized machine would cost me around £1,500 or more. In addition these machines didn’t match one of my main criteria which is instant-on capabilities and putting Windows to sleep and re-awakening it is not particularly fast (or at least testing it on my work laptop seemed to be quite slow).

My thoughts then wandered to the recent Apple adverts for their 12” and 15” PowerBooks and I decided to have a look at what Apple could offer. The 12” PowerBook and 12” iBooks are both pretty small (only a few inches longer and wider than the netBook) but a bit heavier (twice the weight) and the battery life is only around three hours in real life (but this is better than many Windows laptops). On the plus side, Apple’s OS X is based on Unix and is therefore stable, it offers a sleep mode that works in one or two seconds, the 12" screen has a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768 which is great for the web and for working on spreadsheets and is usable in sunlight too. There is also a large library of software for Apples and the community seems to be very friendly and quite like the very friendly and supportive Psion one that I would soon be leaving. Both laptops support bluetooth (the iBook via an external USB dongle) and both support WiFi (the PowerBook supports the newer, faster standard).

Knowing next to nothing about Macs I then headed to my nearest newsagent to buy some Mac magazines so that I could find out a bit more about them. I ended up buying a copy of iCreate which is a new publication aimed at providing step-by-step tutorials to using common Mac software. Not only did this help me to see what OS X could do but it would also walk me through using some of the applications. I was greatly impressed by what I learnt and it seemed that a Mac would be the right machine for me.

Choosing The Machine
Having decided to buy myself an Apple I had to decide which model. The PowerBooks seemed to be the obvious choice having a faster processor, built-in bluetooth, a faster WiFi standard and the top-end model a DVD-writer However I had decided that the laptop need not be a top end machine (I could do any power computing on my desktop machine) and if I didn’t get on with Apples I would rather have minimised my expenditure. I had been advised to buy additional RAM for whichever laptop I went for since Apple tend to ship their machines with a bare minimum so another £100 or so had to be factored in to the overall cost. Further, my existing wireless network at home was the older, slower type and I really didn’t see the need to upgrade all of that too. With all of this in mind I decided to get myself an iBook which, for a model with a 12” screen, 900MHz PowerPC G3 processor and a combo (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) drive would cost me £1050 plus the extra £100 for the additional memory to take it up to 640 megabytes. The other advantage of going for the slightly cheaper option was that selling all of my Psion bits and pieces would cover around 75% of the cost of the new machine.

Preparation
Having decided what I was going to buy I finally ordered an iBook from John Lewis on 24 August. I also ordered the additional 512 megabytes of memory from Crucial and two highly recommended books from Amazon: ‘Mac OS X: the Missing Manual’ and ‘Office X for Macintosh - the Missing Manual’ (relying heavily on Microsoft Office at work I anticipated having to buy a copy of Office X for my iBook if I wanted true document sharing capabilities). I also took advantage of a trip into Bath over the weekend to pick up a copy of ‘Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual’. ‘Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual’ proved to be an excellent buy because it focuses on switching from Windows to Mac OS X and covers areas such as operating system differences, transferring data and finding replacement applications. Feeling much more prepared I eagerly waited for Monday …

The First Day
On Monday 28th August my new iBook was delivered. My first, and totally superficial, impression was that it came in a very smart box where it was obvious that some thought had gone into the design. The packaging was not all polystyrene and plastic bags and a very refreshing change it made too. Setting up the iBook simply involved plugging it in, switching it on and following some very simple instructions. Within a few minutes the Mac OS X desktop appeared and I was ready to go.

The next few hours were spent playing around with the pre-installed software and trying to get to grips with how OS X works. It is very strange moving from an operating system that is second nature to another one which is very similar in many ways but totally different in others. For example, Windows applications generally have a menu bar at the top of their own window. In OS X a single menu is present along the top of the desktop area and its content changes according to which window is active. This is odd at first because a window floating in the middle of the screen has its menu at the top of the screen, not at the top of the window itself.

The next task was to install the memory upgrade that had been sitting on my desk since the Saturday morning. Installing this was a simple process of unclipping the removing the keyboard, removing a covering plate by removing two very small screws and slotting the memory chip in. The whole process took about five minutes and was very straightforward. After re-booting the iBook I was able to confirm that the machine now had a full 640 megabytes of memory installed.

Feeling brave I decided to install a few applications that I had downloaded in advance of the iBook’s arrival. Installing and removing software is a breeze compared to Windows since it essentially entails dragging an icon to wherever you want to software to live. All of the files associated with an application are kept with that icon so dragging it to a different folder moves the application and dragging it to the trashcan deletes it. It’s that simple! There doesn’t appear to be a registry to corrupt, no strange shared DLLs, no messy files left lying around. It’s all very neat and tidy and un-Windows. In any event, within a few minutes I had installed Microsoft Messenger, iConquer, Moneydance, Palm Desktop and SplashID.

After my first few hours with my iBook I was delighted with it and with Mac OS X and had no regrets about my decision on how to move forward with my mobile computing needs.

The First Two Weeks
It has now been just over two weeks since my iBook arrived. In that time we have had a lot of ups and one fairly significant down. I’ve bought new accessories and my ideas about how I would use my iBook have changed slightly …

The one major down that I have had with the iBook was that I had to re-install the operating system. I tried to install an operating system update and something went wrong and the iBook wouldn’t behave properly (mainly manifesting itself in an unwillingness to shut down). I bit the bullet and backed up my applications and documents folders and then reinstalled OS X. I was then a bit wary about the patch and just went ahead with rebuilding the machine to the state that it had been in. This was actually a pretty quick process and the benefits of being able to drag and drop whole applications became a real bonus. A few days after this setback I was feeling brave, had a second attempt at upgrading OS X and it worked fine. I’m not sure what went wrong the first time and maybe I just did something wrong.

The ups have ranged from simple pleasures such as being able to reinstall applications via a drag and drop process through to installing ScummVM and being able to play some favourite old adventure games such as Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle. I have discovered MP3 and put my digital photographs into albums, I have updated my personal accounts whilst sitting in the garden on Sunday afternoon. Essentially, computing has become fun again and there is now a distinct difference between what I do at work and the software I use and what I do at home and the software I use there.

I have certainly spent more on my iBook than I originally intended. In addition to the memory upgrade I’ve also bought myself an Airport card which allows me to connect to my wireless network at home, Office X, a lovely Logitech wireless mouse, bought a copy of Fallout (a role playing game) and registered some shareware applications.. I have also just ordered (and am waiting for) an external hard disk (for backups and MP3 storage), an external keyboard.

This perhaps brings me on to how my perception of how I would use my Mac has differed from what the reality has been. I originally intended to use the iBook around the house as a general machine as and when necessary. I planned to rely on my desktop PC for most of my home computer usage with the iBook being available if we had friends to stay (my PC is in the spare room), needed to surf the web from another room in the house, go through the accounts with my wife, etc. As it has turned out however I have hardly had my desktop PC switched on at all and my iBook has now become my day-to-day computer. It might not be as powerful as my desktop PC but it is much more fun to use and much more convenient, quieter and less like being at work. I actually spent a few days re-installing XP since my previous installation was becoming bloated with old files and software and this showed me another reason why moving away from Microsoft is not a bad idea … After installing XP my PC let me log in a couple of times before locking me out and insisting that I activate the software before I could use my own computer. That’s not what I want or need from an operating system and, while this isn’t an anti-Microsoft rant or Blog, it was another nail in the Microsoft coffin for my home computing needs.

Coming Up
This Blog has largely been born because I had told a Psion Digest that I subscribe to about my move to Apple. Several people emailed me about it, either asking specific questions or simply asking if I would be writing more about my move. This is a way for me to post my discoveries, thoughts and ideas about both my move and on-going use of my iBook and maybe it will help a few people who might want to make a similar move.

In the future I will generally be discussing my day-to-day usage of my iBook, how I am getting on with it, software I have tried and similar subjects. I will also cover subjects such as how I transferred data from my Psion to my Mac and how easy it is to replaced Windows applications with Mac equivalents. However, if there is anything that you would like to see covered then please feel free to get in touch with me.