little. yellow. different. A weblog by Ernie Hsiung

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Tomorrow, I leave for my first two-week trip to Vancouver to work for the new company.

On Monday, my new MacBook came. It’s funny - I’ve had a computer in one form or another for over the past twenty years, and this is the first Mac I’ve ever owned. Not that I’m an anti-Mac zealot; I know my way around PC, and why change what you already know? But I decided to get a Mac for the following reasons:

1. You could dual boot Windows on a Mac, which is necessary for cross-browser web page testing
2. I heard that World of Warcraft runs just fine on one of these things, and
3. Society tells me that only hip people use a Mac, and sweet baby Jesus, I SO want to be part of the fold. (Seriously, you can’t walk into a cafe in San Francisco without seeing a hipster on a Mac. All I need is a nose ring and a heroin addiction and I’m set.)

Now that I’ve had the MacBook for a couple of days, here are some thoughts:

• No surprise, the MacBook is pretty and shiny and white. But as an iPod owner, I know that if you so much as blow the back of an iPod, it will scratch. For this reason, I’m completely terrified of actually using the laptop for fear of wear and tear. Then I realize that my parents were the type of people to cover their furniture with a plastic tarp, and I weep for my carefree youth.
• Not having a Delete key freaks me out. Okay, Macs do have a Delete key, but it really functions as the Backspace key, so it’s not really a Delete key as it is a Delete Key FULL OF LIES. It’s kinda jarring the first couple of times, I’m just saying.
• Ditto with the one-button mouse thing. If it weren’t for my buddy Ben (who also hooked me up with the discount by the way, Gay Apple Mafia in full effect) who taught me the two-fingers-on-the-trackpad-and-click thing, my left hand would have cramped up from doing Control+Click so many times.
• Connecting to a wireless connection is a MILLION times easier. That’s nice.

More thoughts as they come along, but yeah. The MacBook seems pretty solid. I’ll keep this around for a little while.

Congrats on the move, by the way.

What could inspire me to comment after years of silence? Warcraft, duh.

Does it actually run fine on your MacBook? I’m using an older iBook, and WoW is kinda junky. I was thinking of upgrading, but I didn’t know if the MacBook would run WoW well.

Yes, I’m basing a $1000 decision on a game.

One of us! One of us! ONE OF US!!!

Welcome to the world of Mac! (Where 2-button mice are also plentiful and completely acceptable…)

Welcome to the Dark Side. Or the soft, white, plastic side, as the case may be. I saw a post on Lifehacker about remapping your Mac keyboard to live up to your PC expectations. Delete was not specifically mentioned, but maybe it will start you on the right path. click me

This was a follow-up to another post on switching to a Mac that might also be helpful.

And what about World of Warcraft ? I’m actually considering getting a MacBookPro JUST because of it. But if it runs fine on a MacBook …

I have never owned a Windows PC, unless you count the one I salvaged from work and still have never plugged in, and I am TOTALLY with you on the Delete key thing and the one-button mouse thing. It’s time for Apple to admit that two mouse buttons are not a usability gaffe; stupid shortcuts like Control-click are the usability gaffes.

Have fun on your trip! After you get back I want to hear all about Vancouver and also about just how easy it is to dual-boot.

the backspace key works as a delete key (forward) when you hit CTRL or something… but that’s only on the laptops, cuz of the smaller keyboard… but I can live with that. What I can’t live with on a lot of peecee lappies is how they almost always reduce the size of the right-hand SHIFT key to the SMALLEST key on the keyboard and put it right next to, guess what, the Windows key… that has fucked me so many times… *shakes fist in the air*

and about the scratching, who the FUCK cares. I put a whole bunch of stickers on mine… cuz the resale value has already dropped dramatically the moment you signed your credit card slip.

I was never fond of Macs, especially since they never have MS Office pre-installed (using their own incompatible software instead). Of course, MS does not always play nice, either . . .

So, buying a Mac will make you hip, huh??? Thought you were moving to the North Country!

BTW, my grandparents used to have plastic on the furniture, not to mention they used to dust the candy bowl filled with hard, dentist-loving candies. Scary.

Logitec and Kensington make some killer two button small sized wireless mice that are perfect for the laptop.. I love mine, and won’t go back to the trackpad ever again..

Hit ‘function’ + ‘backspace’ to delete instead of backspace.

You don’t HAVE to dual boot to use Windows.
Parallels works just fine for me in windowed or Full Screen/Coherent mode (which is pretty cool, considering).
I have some screenshots of my MacBook running Parallels over @http://flickr.com/photos/ghoti/ (just search for ‘parallels’ or ‘mac’ etc)

i got a mac when i started art school, because society tells me that all artists use them.

i’ve gotten used to the quirks like the delete key, & am now much more comfortable on a mac than a pc. especially because i *never* used the mouse that it came with, & always bought two-button apple compatible mouses (currently as part of a wacom tablet).

the missing delete key has been enough to keep me away. Long live my Sony computers.

What’s this two finger mouse click thing?

I’ve been at my new job for three days and the biggest things about working on a Mac vs living on a PC are these:

* The CRTL vs APPL thing. I spent 5 minutes trying to copy and paste something on my PC before I realized I was hitting ALT instead of CTRL.
* The END and HOME keys are *EVIL* on a Mac — they do what CTRL-END and CTRL-HOME are supposed to do.
* I have one of the “super” mice, and of course I set up the right click to behave like a real right click, but I find the thing twisting in my hand unnoticed so that I go to left click and I get a right click.

Other than that, it’s dreamy.

And then you can also install Mamp and run your own wordpress install for testing purposes…

I knwo the geek in you wants to…

i know it’s wrong to say one loves a material item, but i love my iBook. the only thing that freaked me out was throwing things into the trash to eject. that’s just weird and i still haven’t quite gotten used to it even after owning the computer for 2 years.

Parallels is a must have. I love working in my VM environments and just backing up the complete VM to disk/dvd.

I just switched on Christmas Eve so I’ve had many of the same thoughts.

When I first wanted to (forward) delete I thought I should use Shift+Delete, but it didn’t work. To get around the lack of a (forward) delete key, someone mentioned using the DoubleCommand preference pane [http://doublecommand.sourceforge.net/] to make Shift+Delete = Forward Delete. It feels much better now. Yay OSS! That’s gotta be good for *some* geek cred.

I like my speck see-thru shell [http://www.speckproducts.com/13mac-seethru.html] to keep the MacBook shell all nice and stuff.

I heart my Mac.

Hi.. see you in Vancouver. BTW… I’m switching to a mac too - tomorrow… We’ll struggle together but don’t fret, we have a team on mac so i’ll arrange for a crash course for both of us.
cheers.

I priced these in Taipei yesterday and just about crapped my pants when I realized they were more than twice as expensive as a PC laptop (in Taiwan). Someone said that Hong Kong is the place to buy Macs. Hrm.

So how come I want one?

i went through this myself when i bought a macbook last summer. i wanted to be one of the cool geeks at blogher and SXSW… though not macbook pro cool…lol.

anyways:
* hit fn + delete to “forward delete.”
* for a right click, try enabling trackpad gestures instead of ctrl-click.
* And Apple was kind enough to post Mac OS x keyboard shortcuts

ooh … and i forgot one more: command + delete = move to trash without having to reach for the mouse.

YOU’VE FINALLY CROSSED OVER!!!! I’m so proud of you!!!

Have fun in Van!

I also recently bought a mac for the first time. If you google it, you can find information on the file you need to edit to fix the delete/backspace thing and that Home/End thing. It was just an easy copy and paste. It doesn’t fix it universally, but 90% of the time Home/End do what I expect them to do without having to press control first.

The Gay Apple Mafia is one of those things you always knew existed.

my roommate got a new macbook and also got a bluetooth apple mouse that has the one-button look, but has the functionality of a two-button mouse thanks to pressure sensors or some such, as well as some other pressure-sensitive functions.

worth looking into if you ask me.

So *that’s* how one has sex with an iPod!

Who knew?

…two fingered scrolling is the greatest thing ever.

one more page that may help you: 10 tips for new Mac users, switching from Windows….

Woo hoo! I’m excited to hear you jumped in and got a Mac! I’ve had my iBook G4 for a little over two years, and it still rocks. No need to worry about the Delete key, as the “Force Quit” function works well should a program crash. I find the Mac OS to be far more stable than windows, and rarely do programs crash.

As for the mouse issue, you can always do what I did. Buy a two button mouse with a scroll wheel (USB powered), and you’re golden. You don’t even need the software to get it to work.

About the two finger right click, does it work on a PowerBook G4?

Dood… You play WoW?!?

I’m on Boulderfist… If you need a tailor/enchanter (and are on that server) hit me up!

F~

(Yeah, I know… A real meaningful and deep post… eh?)