watching the world whizz by in a blur

10.5mm | 1/3 at f2.8 | +1 ev | iso 500 | flash dnf

24 inches of pleasure

the mac finally arrived. and we’ve been busy getting acquainted thus the lack of postings.

i must say, its been a dream so far (‘cept for the time when i loaded a whole shit load of applications that i know has no use and finder went kabluey) – lightroom & photoshop on mac, 24 inches of desktop real estate and the new slim mac keyboards are just simply superb.

nonetheless there are somethings that i really miss about windows :-

1) shortcut keys (winkey+r, winkey+d, winkey+e , alt+spacebar, alt+f etc) – i am impartial to shortcut keys and use them extensively in my day to day usage. i can get to the command line in 1.5 seconds with “winkey+r – type cmd – enter” and i’ve kinda even memorized a good bunch of photoshop shortcut keys to work really fast on my photos. with the mac, key assignments are a little weird – takes a while to open finder, navigate to “utilities” then to terminal and “alt+i+p” no longer crops the picture to the selected area in photoshop. i know, you can customise key combinations in OSX but its kinda a pain to balance which key combinations has been taken up and whats not used yet.

2) forms + the tab key – option buttons (ok, cancel, radio buttons etc) used to be so easy to click with the tab and space bar. tab only works for the field inserts but wont tab into the option buttons on the mac. you need to take you hand off the keyboard, move the cursor to “OK” and click it no matter what.

3) remote desktop – used to be able to access my home machine with copssh and rdp from work to sort our internet connection issues for the family or to manage torrent downloads. need to install vnc on the mac (which i am not a fan of due to security concerns) before remote desktop access is achievable.

4) remote desktop connection (for mac) – we do work from home a lot via vpn. the mac equivalent of remote desktop connection client can’t handle multiple instances. i can’t access my sms server and domain controller at the same time!

i am sure that it’ll take a little while before i get used to working with the mac then get around to really customising it to the way i can really be efficient with it. apart from the listed gripes, everything else is super – pictures and photographs look really really good, system purrs along even with a number of memory intensive programs loaded and of course, it’s a really beautiful hunk of aluminum & glass to display on the table.