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Mac Users - Reveal yourselves

Are you an apple user?

  • Total voters
    62
PC at work
Mac Book Pro (and EEE) at home

Mac Pro is nice

Cons:
- Keyboard dropping the first letter (but I bought the little bluetooth keyboard & that is a lot nicer to use)
- I have had a couple of crashes in Leopard and the spinny wheel of doom is not unknown (but probably more robust than PC)
- There is no decent equivalent to MS Money of which I am aware
- Excel 2008 won't have macros, so I will need Windows still for that + Money
- I have borked my Parallels and need to boot into Win separately

Pros
- all the usual
- In the quiestest moments it is possibly to log in as a guest in order to surf Donkey Pr0n etc, safe in the knowledge that all those incriminating cookies etc will be wiped when you log out (or so I am led to believe)
 
Macbook (Black, 2GHz, CoreDuo rather than Core2Duo) which I use every day at home and at work. At work I have a PC as well but only use if for Windows-only stuff that I don't want to run in a VM.

I also have a Powerbook 12" (1.25GHz) which Mrs Llama uses at home.

In a box somewhere is a Titanium Powerbook (667MHz) but the display hinge broke on that and it woudl cost much more than the machine is worth to repair it.

I have a PC at home, but that's acting as a file server and running a Linux VM.

I bought the TiBook back when I earned more and could afford shiny toys. After seeing that, several of the people working with me, principally Unix sys admins, bought Macs and the same has happened at my current job since getting the MacBook.
 
paolo999 said:
In a cupboard, I've got a G3 233Mhz, 160mb RAM. I really should dust it off. Old OS admittedly, and that spec doesn't sound like much, but it ran like shit off the proverbial - even compared with my newer much 'higher' spec PC stuff. Was always very happy with it, mainly for Cubase, but also Photoshop and other demanding stuff.

I struggle with Macs these days... I think there's a kind of "muscle memory" effect when you get used to an OS. You reach for things, find they aren't there, then get frustrated. I've sat with friends MacBooks and really hated trying to use them. But I'm sure it would only take a few days - Apple's belief in simplicity is still thoroughly alive I expect.
Click to expand...

yeah - when i did my teacher training we had to write about learning to do something new as adults to consider the needs of adult learners and I wrote about just that - It did only take a month or so.
 
I'll use this thread to say how useful I've been finding Automator recently. Today, I came accross http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html - Astronomy picture of the day. Those pictures are all fantastic and I wanted to get them for myself for my screensaver. Unfortunately, each hi-res jpeg was several clicks deep from the index page. But Automator lets me scan a page for links, filter those links, get a list of links to .jpeg files, then download each one of those images to a location.

Effort: 5 minutes
Running time: About 30 minutes
Result: Folder of approx 1500 space pictures :)

I couldn't have even contemplated doing it by hand. I can't program or script at all. But Automator let me drag and drop a process to take all the tedium out. That was great :)

automator-nice.png
 
Automator is actually really good for simple repetitive tasks. You managed to find one that it was actually scripted to do already - something slightly different, it would have been useless for, so that's not a terribly good example... but if you want to carry out a series of tasks which are very easily listed it's great.

I have a "desktop cleanup" automator action, which sends all the pictures on my desktop to the Pictures folder, imports all the MP3s into iTunes etc etc, and I have an "rsync to iPod" one which triggers a load of Applescript and bash code to synchronise my current Documents folder and a few other bits and bobs to my iPod, ready for me to restore it the other way to my Powerbook. I could do these in Applescript, but it's much quicker to drag and drop.
 
My brain is too tiny to get my head round automator :( I just don't get it. I tried once to get it to move some files but it baffled me...:(:confused:
 
It's not worth using for its own sake, but if you ever start thinking "this is fucking dull, and I seem to end up doing it all the time" then it might be time to drag Automator out.
 
uh huh. tbh, it's not been the 'oh this again' tasks I've used it for, more like the 'only a robot could click a mouse like this non-stop for 25 days' sort of jobs.
 
There are a few nice toys in the Mac OS that I'd like to see on PCs.

Maybe that's not 'tribal' enough an outlook but I like the look of that Automator and like the 3d calculator (do they still have that?).
 
I have an iMac - 17" cheaper one. It's my first mac, I couldn't afford a more expensive one. I like it a lot though. I'm not a techie, and I love the simplicity of it all. I just don't worry about anything.

My friend, a complete pc-head, constantly goes on about how shit macs are, saying they are all form and no substance, yadda yadda. She spends entire days on techie forums and builds pcs ect. I have neither the time nor the inclination to do that, so for me a mac is about as damn near perfect as I can get. Horses for courses, innit.

I can see me staying with mac.

I need to clean my keyboard though. God, I'm a dirty fucker.
 
If Automator could type some text for me, it'd be perfect, but it doesn't so I don't use it (at least I haven't found a way yet).
Been trying out the latest Quickeys instead (old time mac software - I used to use it all the time under System 6 and 7). Which is a bit shoddy but does the job.
 
I don't own a Mac but do use OSX86 which is very nice thanyouverymuch. But I suppose it doesn't really count or if it does, as a vile perversion or summink. ;)
 
Do you have many issues with that? Any apps not work right, or features missing?
 
Crispy said:
Do you have many issues with that? Any apps not work right, or features missing?
Click to expand...
No issues so far (and I've been using releases since Jas 10.4.8) 'cept that the AMD releases will not support software updates (mostly OS ones). Oh and the Realtek onboard sound on one of my machines sometimes plays silly buggers but I hardly expected it to be completely perfect. Having said that I've just installed an intel Leo release on another machine and it came with specific drivers for the onboard sound which all look to be working fine (haven't had time to try everything out yet).
 
Wow, a Mac thread without editor telling us we're all getting ripped off. Nice work. Of course that Man United eejit had to have his say about novels.

Currently got an iBook but will soon get a black Macbook.
 
Structaural said:
If Automator could type some text for me, it'd be perfect, but it doesn't so I don't use it (at least I haven't found a way yet).
Been trying out the latest Quickeys instead (old time mac software - I used to use it all the time under System 6 and 7). Which is a bit shoddy but does the job.
Click to expand...

I use Butler; you can assign hotkeys to assorted different actions, one of which is "run an applescript and paste the results". So I have combinations assigned for date and time which I can use anywhere. Very handy.
 
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