The Keyboard (and TouchPad)

As I'm sure everyone knows, any Mac keyboard/mouse hardware is somewhat unique. The main features of the the keyboard and touchpad combo on the MacBook Pro are as follows:

• Inclusion of a "command" (aka Apple) button
• Inclusion of specific function buttons (volume, screen, keyboard brightness, etc. controls)
• Absence of Home, End, Insert, PgUp, PgDown keys
• Absence of a "right-click" button on the touchpad
• "MultiTouch" functionality on the touchpad

So at first glance these may not seem like potentially bad things. In fact! Some may even seem good!. I mean who wouldn't prefer a multitouch touchpad or the inclusion of an extra-awesome command button? But my main problem with these is how the absence and inclusions of these features interact with the actual OS that they're intended to run on; OS X.

First off, the command button has been notorious ever since the Mac's came out. It essentially replaced CTRL for any keyboard shortcuts. Now any time I do any normal operation such as cut, paste, copy, select all; I now have to say to myself "oh, that's right command plus whatever key I was going to hit. It's really a minimal problem but when you're switching between windows and OS X, it makes life that much more annoying.

Secondly! Where are my home/end/pgup/pgdown keys!? I realize function up, down, left and right basically accomplish the same things in most mac supported programs, but there's definitely a handful that I use on a daily basis that this can get annoying with. For instance, any time I've ever used a terminal, pgup and pgdown have always scrolled the terminal buffer. For some reason messing with my terminal settings I can still only get my mac to scroll the actual terminal scrollbar, and not the buffer*. How lame is that!

Lastly, I'm just gonna throw these all into one list quick...

1. F<key>'s should be F<key>'s by default. Not a "dashboard" or "next track" key by default. I need my F<keys>!
2. Right click - seriously... no button? Yeah, ctrl click is a right click; but what about in my windows VM!? Now it's that much more painful to multiple select options in a box. What's even better is using the "two-fingered"** approach to emulate a right click in bootcamp. Not a fan.
3. Multitouch - as cool as it is, occassionally this can get in the way as you're accidentally moving fingers around the pad or possibly pressing too hard. It's not too uncommon for me to have an accidental scroll here and there. The scrolling in bootcamp, although it works, is quite touch sensitive by default. I haven't looked into toning that down yet.

BootCamp

I assume if you're reading this you already know what BootCamp is, but for those not in the know; BootCamp allows you to partition your hard drive into a windows section and an OS X section. Allowing you to choose which one you boot when you start up your computer, thus BootCamp - clever. I will say that the drivers for the mac (they come on your OS X CD) for windows are fairly trivial to install, and work fairly well without messing around with stuff. Now you might be saying "You've got this great OS X action going on, why would you ever want to run windows!? Three words - Sam and Max. If I haven't already told you how great that game/series is, I'll have to do it another time. The main point being, nothing I threw in any of my VM's (Parallells, VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox) could keep up with running S&M without a) crashing or b) going too slow to play. So my answer to that was BootCamp.

Now once inside windows everything runs great, the hardware on mac is pretty good and can definitely keep up with most modern games. The problem? HEAT. Like most college laptop users I enjoy using my laptop, specifically; on my lap. I don't know how OS X can tame the wild hardware that this thing has inside of it, but I can only take about 15-20 mins of lap time when playing S&M on my lap. Even running completely idle the computer is fairly uncomfortable to have sitting around, thus making the portability value for your average mac->windows user somewhat absent.

This brings up another point. Apparently it is completely logical to have your MacBook overheat if you shut the lid. The first time I took my laptop into a meeting; I shut it, brought it over to the room, and opened it up only to find that all of my connections have been severed. Apparently by default your MacBook goes into sleep mode when you shut it... huh... I asked a few of the guys in the office about this and they said it was the preferred behavior simply because the MacBook Pro will get somewhat hot if you leave it on and the lid shut. I was somewhat floored at this statement but when in windows/bootcamp I can definitely see how hot my laptop and get, so for now I've just had to accept the fact that whoever designed this device didn't design it to leave it running fully on with a closed lid.

Development

I can't comment on this too much, as I haven't done too much development on the laptop itself (typically I just SSH into the development server and hack away), but I have experienced at least one problem. After a while I discovered MacPorts, an awesome program to install software/code just like apt-get on your favorite debian (or derivative) distribution! Awesome!. At the time I was trying to install xChat so I could hit up the latest #dojo-meeting. Anyways, upon trying to install it I had an error somewhat to the effect of gcc not found. Wha?! On a BSD system there's no gcc!? So thinking like apt-get I figured there was some sort of "apt-get install build-essential". Nope, nothing like that. Turns out you have to install Xcode, a development environment that comes on your OS X cd, in order to get gcc on your system (without compiling from source at least). Not having my CD around, I attempted to download from the site. Stopped again! Now apparently I have to sign up to be an Apple developer just to get to the download links! I'm sure I'm making a bigger deal out of this than it actually is, but at the time this was just simply annoying.

OS X Apps - iTunes, Mail and Spaces

The most of my grievances with OS X simply come from the apps and environment itself. I should probably preface this by saying I've never owned an iPod, iPhone or any other i<device> (except for an iHP-120/140, but I love iRiver!), so maybe I just don't "get" how these apps should work. Personally, I think iTunes seems like a monstorous program for just audio playback. Although over time it has evolved into an all-in-one media center supporting video, RSS and even online shopping; where is my standard standalone mp3 player? The days of Winamp and XMMS are all I'm really looking for when I listen to music, something small, lightweight and that I can just dump whatever plugins I want into. There may be some "iTunes lite" that I'm missing out on, and if someone knows where something like that is I would very much like to hear about it!

But this isn't even the worst part. So iTunes manages all of your media, awesome. There are um-teen hardware and software applications that interface with your iTunes library, great! Now what happens when iTunes destroys it's own library...? For some unknown reason my iTunes apparently loves to upgrade it's library to the newest version of iTunes, yet not upgrade itself so it can read that library; how? I have no idea. The error message is something to the effect: "The iTunes Library cannot be read because it was created by a newer version of iTunes".

The resolution for this, delete your iTunes library file, and re-import all of your 'tunes from the actual iTunes directory. This error has to be common enough to where you think you could probably write that recovery functionality within iTunes itself right? Or maybe I really am the lone person that ever receives this error because I don't know how my mac "just works". At any rate, this is very annoying and happens probably 2-3 times a week.

Mail I don't have as much

Now for my favorite part... spaces!. Ever since I've gotten into using x11 window managers "workspaces" have always been a favorite thing of mine. Split it into 4 spaces, use one for web, one for development, one for music/media and another for misc. When I saw that OS X supported this I have to admit I was pretty excited. Another thing I really like to do while developing is not use the mouse. Switching from space to space, application to application, even moving applications to spaces is as easy as 2-3 keystrokes in most x11 WM's. So let's try out spaces...

• Space to Space - check!
• App to App

- check!

• App to Space - FAIL!

Arg! So now if I want to move some media quickly into one space, or move my development into a web space; I can't! Well, that's not entirely true. Apparently you can hit F8, a dedicated key to space zooming out; click and grab an app then manually move it to a different space. Based on my keyboard complaints above do you see a problem? I now have to hit Function + Play/Pause (F8!) to get this to go. Once again I'm sure I can configure this but seriously, I would be configuring 75% of OS X's functionality by this point. So what now? Maybe we can do it with just the keyboard! Erm... no, we can't. Apparently someone thought it would be a great idea - that if you wanted to move an app from one space to another, you would click the title bar of the desired app, hold down the mouse button and then finally use the keyboard command to switch to another space. How completely ridiculous is that!?

Conclusions?

All in all the laptop isn't a horrible device. There are just enough inconveniences to make me want to look elsewhere next time I get a laptop. I'm sure I could cram lots more into this post but this seems to be enough for now. I also know a few people have been waiting to see what I put here or add their own input, so now they finally can! Eventually I may come up with some more "bad" aspects of my endeavors with the MacBook Pro at a later date, but for now I should really get cracking on some developing so I can post some blogs that aren't quite so pessimistic.

At work my 2-2.5 year Sony VAIO was showing signs of dying. I know these signs all too well:

• Keys are "sketchy" and only sometimes work
• Power connector is loose
• Screen randomly goes flickers on and off
• etc

So it was time for a new work laptop. Recently there has been an influx of MacBooks within our small developer staff, and pretty much everyone seemed to be happy with their purchases; so why not, sign me up for a MacBook Pro! I guess it should be noted I received the 17" MacBook Pro, the 4th generation one with the multitouch mousepad.  So here is my somewhat longwinded take on the newest member of my laptop family.

The Good

So upon first booting up the 'ol mac everything did seem to just work. Perhaps it was fate, but the day before I received my laptop, I had bought my first iTunes mp4s. To those not in the know when it comes to purchasing stuff from iTunes, they basically take down all of your [billing] info and store it in some super-secret location. So when the mac asked me if I had an account, I just entered in my info and BAM! all of my contat info was immediately entered in. The next step was to take a picture of yourself so everyone you talk to can see what you look like. Sadly, I opt'd out of this and replaced it with the avatar that I've currently been using on forums, IM programs, etc.

Adium

I'd have to say that I'm really impressed with Adium as my main instant messaging client. Previously I was mainly using pidgin under Ubuntu/Windows. It worked near flawlessly under Ubuntu with a few bugs in Windows. So far I've had minimal complaints with Adium. The fact that almost every aspect of it is themeable is pretty nice, as well as it's integration with growl. Aside from the learning curve it takes to learn any new program, Adium as the instant messaging client is at least one aspect of OS X that I really like.

Growl

As mentioned above growl is a global notification program for OS X. As of right now I have it hooking into Adium as well as Mail. So any time I receive an IM or an email, I get a small notification "pop-up" in one of the 4 designated corners of my screen, which then fades away a few seconds later. If I'm idle, growl will actually leave them on the screen as a "sticky" popup. Neat! I've been told that Growl will sometimes hog some of your computers resources for some reason or another, but I still have yet to experience it.

Quicksilver

As I've discussed with my friend Jason, quicksilver is probably my favorite part of OS X so far. Their slogan act without doing is probably the best way to describe it. Essentially this replaces the old launcher that was used by OS X, but it does so. much. MORE!. Here's a small list of things you can do, all with a few keystrokes (and ONLY keystrokes!)

• Launch or switch to an application (I use it to switch more than using the commant-tab menu)
• Find/Open files, documents, photos, etc - essentially any directory you setup for QS to index
• Open up a contact's information
• Email a contact (and even attach a file!)
• Automate text entry for almost any webpage
  • Google Search
  • Google Image Search
  • IMDB
  • Wikipedia
  • Webster's Dictionary
  • Anything that uses search string in the URL
• Repeat/Find anything within your bash history

At first it's hard to keep in mind that you can do all this stuff. But if you force yourself to use it, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much QS can do and how customizable it is. It took me a while to get the search engine functionality down, but now it works fairly well. If anyone needs help with it, I'd be more than happy to elaborate on it in another post.

Virtualization and BootCamp

As the company I work for does 90% of our web development offering full support for the Internet Explorer family of browsers, I need windows. Previously in Ubuntu I was using VirtaulBox, an insanely awesome (and free!) virtualization program. Since this is a company laptop, I figured I would try out some of the not-so-free programs and see how they worked. The two obvious choices for OS X are Parallels and VMWare Fusion. I initially tried Parallels, thought it was alright, after about a week I tried VMWare Fusion, and thought it was alright as well - possibly a little better. Within Fusion, the performance seems a little better, the Unity/Coherence mode seems to be integrated a bit better and Fusion seems to offer more configuration options. Other than that, There really isn't that much of a difference. For the most part it's all up to the users preference. But between both choices, they both function great and work very well without unnecessary tweaking.

The other option is to run Windows natively using BootCamp. I had a horrible time attempting to get this installed (we'll get to that later), but once installed, running Windows on the mac is great. Initially after you setup your partition, and boot into Windows, you can load all the necessary drivers for it by just inserting your OS X cd. Brilliant! So now you ahve your function keys, right clicks, multi-touch, wifi; basically everything that worked in OS X is now available to you in windows. I'm hoping to use the drivers on this cd to help my Ubuntu partition along when I get around to installing it.

Misc

A few other things worth noting, but aren't worth going into (or will get elaborated on later):

• Tunnelblick - A VPN Client
• Spaces - New to OS X 10.5!
• HotKeys - Volume, Brightness, etc.
• Multi-Touch Touchpad - Finger Fun on the Touchpad
• Integrated iSight Camera - Mac

The Bad

Unfortunately this hasn't been a completely hassle free transition.  "The Bad": coming soon.