Mac For A Month – 4) Always look on the…

Bright side of life…

I’ve been using the Mac for 9 working days and I’m getting more used to it. But I feel like I’ve been sleeping over at a friends house for a few days: I’m tired, and homesick – it’s want to go home. I want my PC back.

Honesty now: I have had to use my PC a bit. I simply can’t do some things on the Mac because it’s slowing me down and I get irritated easily – I think you know what I mean. For example whenever I need to use LogMeIn Rescue (very often), I have to say to my client “Please hold while I transfer you to another phone… I have to my other computer for this.”

That said, there are few tiny features I do like on the Mac*. I like when I right click a word it immediately highlights it for me so I only have to click ‘Copy’. Or in Outlook I can click an email and it automatically selects all emails in that conversation.

The list of things I don’t like is much longer of course, I am a PC user trying to get used to a Mac. But I can’t get my head around things that seem obvious on a PC; like why I can’t double click on a window to maximise it?! Why must I click the + icon or do a tricky keyboard combination which I keep forgetting.

I remember in the old days, Mac users didn’t have the variety of programs on offer that we PC users did but I’ve noticed it’s not the case today. I haven’t really found many ‘common’ programs that don’t have a Mac version, all the main, basic programs are available for both PC and Mac, even Microsoft Lync (an instant message client). I didn’t expect that. Speaking of Lync, I still haven’t been able to use it because I need to manually put in server details, something I don’t have at the moment. Maybe that’s just a configuration issue on the Lync server we have, but the PCs pick it up easily.

Another issue that happens every now and then, my left monitor changes to a snowy image, like old TV when there was no antenna signal and I have to turn off the monitor to fix it. I took a photo on my Windows phone.  Actually, I’ve just realised I have a Windows 7.5 phone. Let’s try to connect it to the Mac.

[40 minutes later]

I found an app ‘Windows Phone’ on the Apple marketplace, but I had to create an Apple ID to get it. It synced the phone easily and I saw my photos on the Mac, BUT there was NO WAY to find the physical photo! I tried email it through iPhoto but I could not use my Exchange account, so I ended up posting it to Facebook and download it from there.

In a past post I was asked this question:

Hi Kristján
It’s unusual and surprising to find a techie who is not an Apple ‘fanboy’.
I would be interested in a post about why you are not a lover of all things Apple.
Regards Neil

Actually you’d be surprised how many of us aren’t. There are around 15 of us here at Lucidica and out of them only one person is anything close to be an Apple fanboy 🙂 .. and even he’s swapped his iPhone 4s with Samsung Galaxy SIII now. I think ‘Apple mania’ only started few years ago, with the range of smaller devices – the iPod, then the iPhone and then the iPad. Before that Macs were only hugely popular with people who needed specific software – particularly Adobe (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Audition, After Effects etc.)

I grew up with Windows but I did have an opportunity to be an Apple guy. The first computer we had at home was a Mac, but I never liked it.

That’s it for now, only two weeks left of my month and at the moment I can’t wait to get back on my PC.

*Editor’s note: you wouldn’t know it by the number of angry outbursts emanating from Kristján’s desk!