DECEMBER 2005 MA XIMUMPC 3
In the Beginning...
TRANSITIONING FROM LINUX TO OS X WAS SURPRISINGLY EASY. THE HARD PART, IT TURNS OUT,
WAS GETTING THE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS RIGHT
Getting multiple monitors working was a
piece of cake. The hard part was figuring
out how to designate one display as pri-
mary. (Hint: You drag the tiny white bar you
see on this screen to the desired monitor.)
Keeping installed applications organized
is as easy as copying or removing files
from a folder. Just drag and drop!
THE VERY FIRST BOOT
I have to say, I’m impressed with the initial user experience. OS X
walks you through a quick, post-install wizard that confi gures your
basic applications, confi gures a user account, and connects you to
the Internet. Cleverly, the installation and the system-confi guration
portions of the install are separate, so you can actually make an
image of a totally installed OS X partition.
The weirdest thing to me is looking for menus at the top of the
main screen rather than in the actual window. I guess this makes
sense—after all, menus are specifi c to the application, rather than to
an individual application window, but it sucks when you’re using a
multiple-monitor setup. With three displays, I’ve got to traverse a lot
of screen to reach the basic menu functions when I’m working on a
secondary display. This is not good.
This has nothing to do with the operating system, but I have
to admit that I’m impressed with the Apple hardware design, at
least from a cable-management standpoint. Instead of the usual
fi ve cables running between my computer and my desk (monitor,
monitor power, keyboard, mouse, and speakers), I have just two,
speakers and monitor. My keyboard and mouse are both connected
to the powered hub built into the display. There’s no reason a PC
display couldn’t work this way, with the display signal, power, USB,
and FireWire carried over one cable that terminates with separate
standard connectors.
I’m really shocked at how easy it is to install applications on OS X.
Sure, months spent using a Linux box taught me to not take such
a basic task for granted, but in OS X, application management
makes sense in a big way. There are two types of fi les that most
applications need to run: the stuff that should never change—think
executables, art assets, and dll fi les on the PC—and stuff such
as settings information, which is user specifi c. All of the fi les that
never change are stored in a special container fi le, which is kind
of like a zip fi le without the compression, and all the user-specifi c
stuff is stored in a subfolder of the user’s Home folder. To install an
application, you drag the container fi le to the Applications folder,
that’s it. OS X prompts you for an administrator password—note
that you have to have admin privileges to install applications—and
it copies the app to the proper place.
INSTALLING AND MAINTAINING APPLICATIONS
Getting multiple monitors working was a
THE MOUSE AND KEYBOARD
The display might be great, but the mouse and keyboard are abys-
mal. The keyboard’s fl at design made my wrists bleed after a mere
30 minutes, and the mouse is just plain stupid. It’s bad enough
that it has only one button; it’s worse that to click that button you
need to press down on the entire mouse. So I reverted to my trusty
Natural Keyboard Pro and MX510 combo.
Of course, changing to a Windows keyboard messes up my key-
board shortcuts. The Command key, which is the OS X equivalent
of the Control key, isn’t where my fi ngers expect it to be. Luckily,
that’s an easy fi x with uControl (www.gnufoo.org), which allows you
to remap any of your keys to any other function. (The Tiger update
to OS X actually includes this functionality out of the box.)
MULTI-MONITOR SUPPORT
While getting multi-
monitor support
working properly on
my Linux box took
tons of confi g-
fi le editing, driver
recompiling, and the
sacrifi ce of a small
chicken, getting dual
monitors working in
OS X was as easy
as plugging in the
second monitor. I
added a third display
with only slightly
more hassle. I had
to shut down the
PC, install a second
videocard in one of the (distressingly few) PCI slots, and reboot
the machine. When the OS came up, I opened the Displays panel
in the System Preferences app, arranged the monitors as they are
on my desk, and dragged the title-bar panel to my main display.
It was really that easy. I didn’t even have to install a driver!