What follows is a blog of my switching experience. Please feel free to use the form at the bottom of the page to comment or to offer any tips and advice.

I switched because of a fundamental long-standing frustration with Windows and Microsoft. The IBM ThinkPad was a great machine, and in particular IBM offered magnificent service on the extended 3 year warranty. But now the machine was off warranty and was crashing--for no apparent reason--daily, sometimes serveral times a day. I'm fairly certain it was a software problem. In any case, the phenomenon of Microsoft, one of the richest, most powerful companies in the world creating software that generates books and websites called Windows Annoyances says it all. Windows is annoying. That's why I switched.

I was scared to switch, having become comfortable with Windows, but my history was with Apple. I got my first Mac in 1985, only one year after it was introduced. Over the years I became a hard-core Mac user and even wrote one of the first books on HyperCard Running HyperCard with HyperTalk. But by 1996 Apple seemed to be dragging its heels with operating system development (the OS was kind of stagnant and crashing a lot), and in particular, new exciting Internet-based applications were coming out months or even years ahead of the Mac on the Windows platform. The whole story of my switch away from Apple was published in Business in Vancouver.

Ironically things have now come full circle. Reading that old article today, you can pretty much reverse the words "Windows" and "Apple" and the story would read true. Steve Jobs returned to fix most of Apple's problems and implemented OS-X, the Unix operating system upon which the Mac is now based. To put it simply: OS-X is the reason I switched back to Apple. Unix underneath has made Macs very stable. Besides the usual Microsoft and Adobe offerings that work well on the Mac, there is vast world of new and exciting software available and always emerging as Open Source Unix.

As a cautionary move I bought an iBook from a large retailer that had a no-questions-asked 15 day return policy. Just in case I couldn't stand the Mac/OS-X experience. (The 12" PowerBook was not yet available in Canada.) Everything tested out very well. It was easy to migrate all my software over. The university has a site license for Microsoft Office, so I got that for free. Acquisition took the place of KazaaLite. All the Adobe products work just great on Mac. Virtual PC is there for when I really and truly need Windows.

One problem: there's no Uninstall on a Mac. No "Add/Remove Programs" like on Windows. An Apple KnowledgeBase note says, "In order to uninstall a specific section or sections of installed packages from Mac OS X you must erase the disk and reinstall the operating system, selecting the components you want to install at that time. Apple is aware of this issue and is investigating." Not very nice. Roxio toast works well with the built in CD-RW drive to copy disks on this iBook. The noisy fan came on however. I was listening to music, browsing the web and downloading a big file at the same time when it came on.

I was not successful at getting my old Palm IIIxe with a DB9 serial connector to communicate with the laptop even after trying a couple of different serial DB9/USB converter cables. I was able to move the data over as tab delimited files, but there are tons of quotation marks all over the place in my new Apple Palm Desktop and in the Apple Address Book. Can't find an easy way to get rid of them, short of writing a little text parser.

Here's a comparison between the 12" ibook vs 12" PowerBook i found this morning. Conclusion is: they're both great, but if you can afford the few extra bucks, the PowerBook is a great deal. I have to make decision about whether to take back this iBook.

If you go to http://localhost:631 or 127.0.0.1:631 on your Mac (under OS-X), you will come to a CUPS printer utility. Kind of neat. I still could not get my OfficeJet K60 to work with the Mac. HP is not making drivers. This is sad. I tried GimpPrint, but it would not work. The iBook works fine with the HP DeskJet 842, and 932 that I have. Printing is managed very nicely. Too bad the OfficeJet does not work.

My ThinkPad feels very cool now when I switch to work on it, I mean temperature--as the iBook is quite warm. Also, the IBM keyboard is much nicer. I'm very much planning on returning this iBook and getting the PowerBook 12" mainly for the keyboard.

My external CD-Burner (Pacific Digital) works just great with the iBook. No drivers required. It's a USB device. Talk about plug and play. The Mac is much better at this than Windows. There's no "Windows has detected new hardware and is attempting to...blah blah".

I figured out how to translate my Eudora .mbx files. I open the file in bbedit, then save as... with carriage returns and line feeds selected. It's finicky, but it works. I'll have to do it with all my mailboxes. It's a drag. I will copy all this to a CD, before I give back the iBook. Otherwise, I'm finding all this to be a nice training exercise.

Oh yes, I discovered this at Connectix. It might be a general way to Uninstall applications on OS-X, something that is strangely undocumented in either apple's help, or in some OS-X books...

To delete Virtual PC completely from Mac OS X, these files should be deleted:

1. Virtual PC application folder (Applications folder>Virtual PC)

2. Virtual PC Preferences folder (Users folder>YourUserNameHere folder>Library folder>Preferences folder>Virtual PC Preferences)

3. Virtual PC Application Support file (Library folder> Application Support folder>Connectix folder)

4. Windows or DOS hard drive images (Users folder> YourUserNameHere folder> Documents folder> Virtual PC folder > Windows 2000,Windows 98, etc.)

Someone pointed me to a utility (free) called CarbonCopy cloner which I may be able to use to somehow save my setup on the iBook and move it to the PowerBook.

A surprisingly huge reason for switching is the way the iBook sleeps and wakes up from sleep. It takes less than a second. So nice.

When I go from home to work and back, one nagging problem on the ThinkPad was that I had to remember to change the sendmail (SMPT) server name in the mail program. You cannot use the university mail server to send mail from Telus. The Mac had a pleasant surprise in this department. If I use Apple's Mail client, and I have forgotten to change the SMPT name (which is the usual case) a little window appears saying something like "That didn't work, would you like me to try this other one?" and it gives the Telus mail server. Neat. Windows was never this kind.

A key reason to take back the iBook and put my name on the waiting list for a PowerBook is the keyboard. The reviews are unanimously positive about the 12" PowerBook keyboard. I have found the keyboard on my ThinkPad to be a huge strength. As a writer I type all day long, so this should be a major consideration. I can hardly wait to try the new keyboard. I wonder if a LittleAl is in Vancouver anyplace yet?

One steady annoyance for me is the way the Mac shift key works. There seems to be a longer lag between the time you press the shift key and the time you get a cap. I type fast and there are dozens of times an hour when my caps come out in lowercase. Very annoying. This does not happen in Windows.

However, I'm enjoying the iBook experience. So far I've found every piece of software I've needed and everything is working great. The little thing is warm under my left hand. This is VERY noticable when I switch to the ThinkPad. I can live with it however. Hope it doesn't do any weird long-term damage to my hand. The 12" screen is indeed small. I find I'm having to do a lot of window shuffling and have not perfected this. I don't feel I had to do this as much with Windows.

I love having Unix at my disposal and all the potential programs. Have not even loaded and tried Fink yet.

There are many nice "friendly" features with the way the mac handles digital media that I love. I also like the community. I'm remembering how much I enjoyed my Mac years, Mac user groups, etc. In general, there's a feeling of camaraderie here that I don't get with Windows. With Apple you have the sense that they are somehow "with you", whereas Microsoft is more like "we'll do it for you". Do you know what I mean? I get a much greater sense of big brother with MS. Maybe this is a false sense, but it's significant.

I'm still not happy with my email situation, sometimes using Eudora, and sometimes Mail.

Also, I'm worried about file compatibility issues. I emailed a graphic to a few dozen people yesterday and some are complaining they cannot view it. I wonder if this is an artifact of it being created on a Mac?

So... still in the testing phase, but I really am enjoying it.

The University Microcomputer store educational price for the 12" PowerBook is about CA$2500, considerably less than the discount this fellow is offering. In fact just yesterday I put a deposit on the base model with added 256MB memory (CA$141, which by the way only brings it up to 384MB and gives you a useless DDR 128MB chip to put in a drawer), and the AirPort Extreme card (CA$152), all for a total of CA$2809 before taxes.

there was a discussion at Slashdot where a guy asks for recommendations about a laptop to run Linux. He wants something small, powerful, light, but WITHOUT windows installed. A general consensus was that he should buy a 12" PowerBook. There were some great contributions from guys who had them and were loving them.

Last night I read about Apple Script. It looks just like HyperTalk--something I know about. I was very excited to see how tightly this is all integrated into the OS. I must eventually try and write some of these scripts. For instance, in Mail I miss Eudora's ability to unword-wrap or rewrap text. I find this useful so that recipients don't get weirdly broken up emails. I'm currently cutting and pasting into BBedit to do this. If I can write an AppleScript add on to Mail to do this that would be cool.

This morning I thought to pop my old Great Canadian Scientists CD-ROM into the iBook. Note: this was made in about 1996 and I have rarely been able to use it in Windows for the last few years. The last time it worked was on Win98. It sort of almost works on Win2000 but then there's a problem when it tries to save a required text file to disk. Something has changed in the way Windows does things.

Can you imagine my pleasure when Classic environment just started up, and the music started to play and my old CD-ROM *just worked*! Delightful.

I have to say, as the days go by, I'm feeling really good about this Mac. Just going back and forth to work is such a joy compared to how it was with Win2000/IBM. Not that the old ThinkPad was a bad machine, but this is considerably better.

Just the "instant on", the "location" feature, and the way Mail figures out *for you* what SMPT server to use makes me smile twice a day. This is a huge thing. And there are many more.

By the way, I discovered Eudora mailbox cleaner and I'm going to try that for importing all my Eudora stuff to Mail. (Later: this worked by the way.)

I had a big day yesterday in the continuing saga of my Mac conversion. I got into the area of customizing applications. Not much really, but I figured out how to make Terminal run a set up script so that when I click it now, it automatically SSH's to my SFU Unix account. Very slick. Also, it has a nicer font and background colour, and other very pleasant behaviours.

Then I learned something about Services. I figured out how to use them, and I set up a script for text manipulation called Text Wielder that is available in any program and does all this amazing stuff with text AND you can program it to do any other thing with text strings. Very cool. Now I have solved the problem of text wrap in Mail. Delightful.

Also, I feel I've just scratched the surface. All this is because of Apple's choice to go with Unix. Absolutely brilliant. I can hardly wait to explore and learn more. Really looking forward to Applescript for instance...

I reread the Business in Vancouver article from 1997 where I describe my reasons for leaving the Apple Macintosh platform. All those things I said are true. Here's my point by point rebuttal 6 years later. Things have really changed. Right off the top:

1. The OS-X operating system is now arguably superior to Windows. Apple has brought Unix to the desktop. An incredible feat. In fact as you look at the points below, you will find that many of them are based on the stronger quality and features of OS-X compared to WinXP.

2. Applications are significantly better on Mac now than they were 6 years ago. What's more the entire world of Unix apps whether from BSD or Linux is available. Because these are generally OpenSource, this represents a huge world of new, free, constantly emerging and interesting stuff to try. Also with Unix underneath everything, it's as though Apple is going in the opposite direction from Microsoft: we hackers (in the traditional, not malicious sense of the word) now have a command line, while in WinXP the command line and underlying DOS is ever further obscured. On the other front, for big-scale applications, you can use OpenOffice if you want an MS free environment, or you can also use MS Office on Mac, which is arguably superior to the WinXP version. Really nice, and by the way, free to SFU employees due to site license arrangement. Apple's coup of putting MS Office on Unix is huge.

3. Price has come down significantly to the point that a nicely appointed Mac is just about the same price as the equivalent PC, or only a few hundred dollars more, not thousands. Compare my small new PowerBook with equivalent WinTel alternatives from Sony and Toshiba. The price is the same. The Apple offering is arguably better because unlike the Portege or Vaio, it *contains* the optical drive while they have docks for this.

4. Apple has embraced the Internet and cross-platform communications, network printing, file transfer, etc in a way that captures *ALL* platforms (unix, mac, Windows) whereas Windows is very self-centered. To Windows, the outside world does not exist or the methods to access it are perverse and frustrating. With my Mac, life is easier because I have WinTel and Mac machines at home and a Unix network at Work. My mac works seamlessly (with a bit of relatively easy setup) everywhere. Also, setting up the Internet, switching locations, and downloading stuff works either easier, or more elegantly on the Mac. This is true for built-in BlueTooth and WiFi 802.11g, too.

5. Multimedia. While Windows is trying, Apple has truly succeeded in making a multimedia machine that works beautifully. No matter what you are trying: printers, scanners, cameras, camcorders, CDs, DVDs, microphones, voice commands, everything just works--and sensibly, too.

6. Both Windows and Macintosh OS's try to "think for you", but there's a fundamental difference in how they do this. Windows *imposes* its monopolistic will all the time, making decisions that it decrees to be the way things should be done all the way from spelling and grammar to where files should be stored, to the web search results. It's very mercenary, patronizing, irritating, and annoying. Apple, on the other hand has a more philosopher-king style, making "kind suggestions" rather than decrees, and guessing what you want correctly, sensibly, and unobtrusively more of the time. Somehow the choices Apple makes feel much kinder than Windows and always make you go "Wow, thanks" instead of "Oh damn, leave me alone." This is pervasive.

7. While one can make a few criticisms, it does seem that since Jobs came back, Apple is very much more on-track and has a more solid business plan and future development path. With new IBM G5 chips coming, and focus on smaller, multimedia-based, no CRT, BlueTooth, FireWire, 802.11g, DVD burning, TV, iPod, and other emerging technologies (hand-helds, handwriting recognition, voice recognition) Apple again seems ahead of the curve and leading the industry in the way it originally did in the 80s.

8. Windows machines crash with some regularity and consistency. They also require frequent rebooting for various reasons. The new mac OS/Machines essentially never crash. What's more, the way the Mac turns on and off from sleep (takes less than a second) works flawlessly. Sleep and hibernation in Windows notebooks is a royal pain in the ass. On a Mac, very typically you can go for weeks and even months without rebooting (so I hear). This, alone, is reason enough for switching.

9. The mac always handled bit-maps, screens, and printing better than Windows. A new imaging system based on pdf and other technologies (Quartz, Altivec) makes working with and looking at images and text arguably superior on Mac than Windows.

10. Hardware externals and upgrades are still a bit more expensive on Mac but not anywhere near as bad as it was 6 years ago. What's more, tons of generic stuff just "works" on Macs now as it never did before, for instance, my Fuji camera, my Microsoft wheelmouse and my external Pacific Digital CD-RW burner, my external 4GB HD, and a host of printers. All these are USB devices. They just work beautifully and with no drivers to install, no dll's to manage, nothing to think about. Just plug-em in and they work. No windows pop up saying "Windows has detected blah blah". The 802.11 card was indeed more expensive ($140 instead of $80 for a PC, but it does 802.11g if necessary). I can get a generic base station from Linksys or Microsoft. I don't have to buy the Mac AirPort one--which anyway, is competitively priced.

11. The Mac is more backwards compatible than Windows. My old 1996 Great Canadian Scientsts CD-ROM works on the latest macs, but will not run on Windows any more (after WinME).

So, after six years, for all those reasons I came back. I'm back to "writing this on my mac". And it feels great. My new 12" PowerBook is small, light, fast, quiet, bright, clean brushed aluminum, and hey, it's even warm to the touch. I'm glad to be back.

I'm discovering this morning that the fan is going on and I'm only running Mail and Safari. Very low demand on the machine. If I switch to 'reduced' processor performance, the fan goes off, and I notice no degradation in what I'm doing--though I'm not doing much.

So, despite what I said in the previous email, this heat thing is something to contend with, lovely and warm as my palms may be.

While the new PowerBook doesn't ever crash, and hence never needs to be rebooted, it DOES seem to run hotter and hotter until you reboot, after which it runs cooler. This makes me think that 'garbage' processes are running in the background generating heat. It DOES run cooler in reduced processor performance mode and I have not noticed this mode cause any big problems unless you are doing a lot like listening to music, editing files and running big apps like Adobe Illustrator or something all at once.

I'm bugged by the way the Mail program has no easy way to wrap text. I wish it had this because everytime I reply with some selected text, it gets all wrapped funny and I have to take out carriage returns. I have to use Bbedit to do this.

I got all my eMail over nicely with that Freeware program, Eudora Mailbox Cleaner (see above). Very nice in fact. Also, it did conversions for the Address book. I'm still having trouble with the address book. What a crappy program. I managed to get stuff in from my Palm Desktop address file by saving as tab delimited, but it brought everything in with tons of quotation marks. Also, every time I double click on the nickname file generated by the freeware program it duplicates all those entries in the Address Book so now I have about three of everyone. I still have not managed to move my Palm Calendar stuff over.

I ordered memory from Crucial and will return the SIMM I got from the local store. The difference was about CA$60, IF I don't get any tax/duty/customs surprises. (Crucial said taxes would be about US$6 which makes sense.) Ironically the deal was worth it for 256MB SIMs (US$42) but not 512MB SIMs (US$130). I'm just upgrading to 384MB. Maybe after a while, when I need it, larger memory will come down in price. I have heard that the PowerBook can actually take a 4GB SIMM if they ever make one. Hopefully by next year I'll be able to get a 1GB SIMM.

I don't know. My old paper system is starting to look pretty good. Frankly, if I had to make an honest analysis of my Palm use: I use it for just two things:

1. Looking up and storing phone numbers, etc.

2. Maintaining appointments.

I very rarely use any other applications (calculator is really the only thing I sometimes use). I stopped using email, Avant-go, etc. quite early on, as they were more bother than they were worth. Travel guides for France did not turn out to be that useful either. For me, the Palm is a phonebook and calendar and that's it.

Hence, it would seem that my old paper Day/Timer system could do just the same job. I have not found the Palm faster for finding things in general, than just flipping directly to the page in a little paper phone book. I think the best solution for me might be a way to format and print my Palm phonebook, and somehow put this into my little black book. I still find myself carrying around a little notebook, even with the Palm because there are just things that need to go on paper, in my opinion. Couple this with the new PowerBook's instant-on, small size, etc, and I might be OK.

What I really want is a new BlueTooth phone that has a really good Calendar system. This, coupled with the PowerBook with its built-in BlueTooth would be my ideal combo--AND I get to eliminate one gadget that I carry around. That is: I only need the phone and the computer, not the phone, PDA, and computer as I do now.

I'm still waiting for the Airport Extreme card, which is backward compatible. Did not order a base station. Personally, I don't see the need to go beyond 11b speeds which are faster than my ADSL connection anyway.

When the time comes (if my PowerBook is not obsolete by then) I can always get a flash upgrade, or buy an 11g base station if necessary. I'm not even sure I'll get a base station for the home. We are very comfortably wired with Ethernet to most rooms. I just want the card so I can try the laptop in Starbucks, hotels, etc., and also all over the university which is totally wired for WiFi campus wide. If I feel rich one day, or if the price comes down, I might get a WiFi router with print server to replace the old 486 household server in the attic. It would have to have an Ethernet out though for the hub to all the other PCs in the house.

I'm going to Phoenix in two weeks for a family wedding. If I get the 802.11g card by then, I could try it there, for instance. That would be neat.

I find very little difference in heat and performance between the 800MHz iBook and the 867MHz PowerBook. That's been my experience. I noticed a greater increase in performance from boosting the memory, than from switching machines. Also, the keyboard on the PB is nicer, which is a huge thing. It looks nicer, and I think the sound is just a bit nicer. I don't think there's much other difference, frankly. If I was advising someone, I'd tell them to get an iBook. Don't forget I got my PowerBook for CA$2500 (educational pricing) which is CA$400 off the list price, so that was a strong reason why I went this route.

I am really enjoying my mac. Maybe it's just 3.5 year newer technology than the ThinkPad it replaces, and I'd have the same experience on a brand new WinTel box with the latest version of WinXP and new versions of software, but I find I can run virtually an unlimited number of applications, music, printing, Internet downloads, etc, and the thing does not even hiccup. These are big honking applications like InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop all running at once with music, printing, and downloads going in the background--no problem.

Also, the fact that I never have to shut down or reboot, and the thing is always on, and plugging in printers or anything is a snap and requires no fiddling, and the Location manager making switching from home and work environments a breeze, etc. This is great. I also feel the screen rendering is more pretty than in Windows. Font metrics are more beautiful. They always have been in Mac. Remember, Apple was the original implementer of the square pixel and bit-mapped graphics on the original 1984 Mac.

Finally, last but not least: it really and truly never crashes. It's also very quiet. I am, so far anyway, very pleased with the purchase.

Found Pacifist. It lets you open up Apple Packages to get at the files inside.

Found it at

MacOSXhints website's pick of the week, a compendium of all their picks. This is one of the best resources for Mac I've found to date.

I'm very much enjoying Safari. Also, Camino (was Chimera) is a damn nice browser. Microsoft's IE works fine on Mac as well. If fact for some sites, it's the only one that works properly. So, ironically, on the web browsing front, the Mac has faster, nicer browsers than I had on Windows. This is ironic because my original reason for leaving the Mac platform was lack of cool Internet software. I'm still waiting for the time that I find the Mac lacking in some way. In fact, it's for this reason that I have yet to install Virtual PC.

Today, I had an interesting moment. I was on a Windows machine at this event downtown and wanted to check my email. Normally when I'm on a strange networked computer, I ssh into our mail server at the university and use the old unix 'mail' command to view messages. I got to the Command prompt on this XP-based machine. Tried typing ssh shell@css.sfu.ca but of course nothing happened. (I had to download a terminal client -- PuTTY is my favourite--to do the job.) One thing I love about the mac is the command prompt where you can go and just type in commands like ssh and they just work. To some extent you can do this on Windows, but Mac has now leapfrogged Windows in this.

Spent a long time last night reading through this guy's whole analysis of Mac OS-X vs XP. Pretty good. Somewhat Mac slanted, but not too much. I think the key thing that came out, and probably one of the biggest reasons why I switched, why I find Mac the nicer environment was the notion that on Windows you are assumed to be a criminal. That's putting it a bit harshly, but he has lots of examples of this. Second to that is the much poorer interface/user experience factor. A very good site and worth looking at.

I tried Sherlock today for the first time ever. It's been sitting on my Dock, but I've never clicked on it. Quite a neat program. And now with sherlockers.com it's amplified further. Is there anything like this in Windows? Very cool.

I'm enjoying my Mac more and more each day.

Yesterday, I tried hooking it up an old Digital 14" monitor I've got. It was trivial to set it up with the best resolution for that old monitor (which turns out to be the same as the PowerBook). Very nice. Big difference in quality and crispness of image between the 10 year old CRT and the brand new flat panel. But it can still serve as a holding place for windows and pallets. It all worked as advertised and put no extra burden at all on the PowerBook. Of course now I feel I need an external Flat Panel monitor.

Another interesting piece of freeware: Process Wizard from France lets you view active system processes, change process priority and kill hanging processes with a Control-Click. Haven't tried it to be honest, but it looks cool.

After a couple of solid weeks of use, I DO think I have discovered one bad thing about this new machine/platform, PowerBook/OS-X. I find that, after running for several days, the machine benefits from being shut down and restarted. This causes it to run cooler, and generally causes applications to behave better and run quicker. I don't know what causes this, and I have not seen this reported yet in online discussion groups, and I don't know if it's unique to this model or to the latest OS update 10.2.4, but I do find it helps to reboot every few days.

Nevertheless, this is better than my old ThinkPad/Win2K system that had to be rebooted several times a day.

I got Virtual PC going and it is running really nicely. In full screen mode, it almost makes me feel like I'm on my old 433MHz ThinkPad. This is Win98. I have little or no use for it right now, however.

Here's a tip: if you have the DVD version of the Restore disc, and you simply want to restore a single application, you must reveal the hidden files and folders on the DVD. To do so, use Marcel Bresink's free TinkerTool. Among its many features, TinkerTool allows you to show hidden and system files (this option is in TinkerTool's Finder tab).

With the hidden files revealed, insert the Software Install and Restore DVD. When the disc mounts you'll see a list of files and folders that weren't visible before. Open the .images folder to reveal a host of .dmg files. These are disk image files of the third-party applications that shipped with your Mac. Double-click the .dmg file of the application you want to restore to mount the image. Open the mounted disk image and then the Applications folder within to reveal the host folder for your application. Drag that folder to the Applications folder at the root level of your hard drive. The application is now restored and ready to use.

Spent a while getting MT NewsWatcher by Simon Fraser and set it up. The setting up was maddeningly difficult. But after reading the help file, I figured it out. Works fine.

I miss my ZoneAlarm alerts that tell me when strange packets are being sent to and from (!) my PC. Is there any sort of ZoneAlarm utility for Mac OSX?

Acquisition, the preeminent Mac OSX P2P file sharing program is maturing. It's a gnuttela client, but it's really becoming superb. They just released version 8.2 today. I highly recommend you download it, and pay for it ($10 educational). It has now got one of my favourite old features of Napster: browse host. When you get a really fast file transfer going from someone, with a click you can view everything they've got and get a ton more stuff. Very cool. It has many other nice features similar to the best Windows P2P clients: multiple hosts, automatic re-tries, restoring stopped downloads, etc.

Yesterday my friend Scott came over with a Bluetooth phone, one of only two actually available at the moment in Vancouver as far as I can tell. This was the Sony/Ericsson T68i. (The other one is the Nokia 6310i but it's two year old technology and is not even worth considering.) It turns out, if you are a loyal Fido customer, they will send you a new phone every 18 months to try, and if you like it, they give you a good deal on it. (In this case CA$300) It was lovely to see it connect to the Mac, and vice versa. The wireless earphone was also very cool. There were a few other cool features, but Scott decided not to keep it for a few reasons. The menu system is not as nice as Nokia's and there were a number of crucial things missing from the OS and a few kind of annoying things. We're going to wait for the Nokia 3650 that is supposedly coming to Vancouver in July. I can hardly wait. Symbian OS and everything.

I don't think the heat thing is that bad. It does get warm. If I was a reviewer I would mention the fact that if you reboot after about a week, the heat is better managed, at least on mine. This seems odd and is something I'd like to see discussed in the press. Also, I find that if you are just doing mundane tasks like email and web browsing, it does not actually get that hot. You really have to crank it up with iTunes going, a big Adobe ap and some major downloads to get it "uncomfortably" hot. In truth, even then, it gets no hotter than the 800Mhz iBook, so I don't see how this is a valid criticism.

The case does scratch and marr easily. I've been keeping mine in the original plastic packing wrapper/bag, except on the trip to Phoenix where I was taking it in and out of my bag many times for security and in waiting lounges to watch "Bowling for Columbine" which by the way I thought was excellent. The case gets scratched very easily, and the aluminum is starting to show the oils from my palms on the palm rest area.

Battery life, too, is a bit disappointing. It's only slightly better than my 3-year-old ThinkPad. It's never been a problem for me yet, but it's certainly a good criticism. Actually, there was a time when I did not use the PowerBook for a few days, and left it in sleep, unplugged from the AC adapter. It can only sleep for a day or two, and then it runs out of juice and just shuts off.

One thing that is not often mentioned is the nice way that *ALL* the connections are along the left side. This might not sound like much at first, but it's a lovely design feature. Very convenient. You really notice it when you go back to an "ordinary" Laptop and have to hunt for connections at the back.

The mac is still great, but I did have to do my weekly reboot today, as the fan came on. It's really incredible how much cooler it gets after a reboot.

One problem I had: I tried to download and burn the Mandrake 9.1 CDs yesterday and could not create usable copies after two tries with Toast. (Usable copies for a PC, that is. I'm thinking of installing Mandrake on my old ThinkPad.) I mean I could not create CDs where you could see the files on the CDs. I don't know what I was doing wrong or if I got corrupted .ISO files to begin with during download, or what.

George Emerson in the Globe & Mail raves about the Mac...

I did my taxes using GriffTax Simple in Virtual PC on my Mac today. I did manage to accomplish the task, but boy, did it ever remind me of how different the two environments are. What a shame that everyone is not using a Mac. I should probably be thankful that it worked at all, but here are some of the things that happened:

1. VPC for some reason is now missing a file on boot up (FSHARE32.VXD). I don't know why or how this happened, though I have some suspicions. Anyway, this is **SO** typical of Windows. It all still works but I have to "Press a key to continue" during bootup. Boy that brings back memories. (I find I cannot drag files from the VPC window to the Mac desktop, so I think this is part of the fhsare32.vxd problem.)

2. During the process when I got to the NetFile feature--In Canada you can submit tax refund claims over the Internet to the government--I had to upgrade to 128bit encryption in IE and this necessitated a reboot--what a pain.

3. I got a blue screen crash at one point. Why, I don't know. But nothing was lost. Just a typical Windows crash I guess. Had to restart. CTR-ALT-DEL did not do it. I had to do a hard restart.

Anyway, I did both of our taxes, (me and wife), and it only cost CA$10 + tax and about 3 or 4 reboots/crashes of Windows. Not bad. The mac never crashed, but the fan came on for VPC and has stayed on during the whole process.

Too bad GriffTax (which I think was originally a Mac Product) doesn't have a "Simple" version native to Mac. Other than having to use Windows, the whole process was very nice.

Very good review of the 12" PowerBoook the Register. I was fascinated about some of their points: the keyboard letters are "stenciled on", battery recharging caveats, max memory simms of 4GB (if they ever make them), problems with non-mac WiFi networks, etc. Great review.

Today I installed a nifty application I found called iPulse. It's like a clock, but it shows a ton of machine stats such as memory, HD space, Network activity and CPU activity. Kind of nice.

Mark Liyanage's site in Switzerland is an amazing wealth of information and good ideas for outstanding shareware/freeware/commercial OS-X software and system setup options.

Rob Griffiths's great *Free* resources, including entire pdf books on making the best of the Mac OS.

Griffiths also runs macosxhints.com which is arguably the most educational Mac OSX site in existence. You can learn something new there every day.

I downloaded an Internet Plug-In called PDF Browser Plugin by Manfred Schubert that makes *all* Mac web browsers display pdf docs right in the browser. Very nice, instead of having all these pdf files cluttering the desktop and always calling Viewer or Acrobat to display them.

Now that I have iPulse, I was able to determine what it is that causes the PowerBook to heat up after a few days. It's the Finder. As I was working today, the usual thing happened: it began to get hotter, and the fan went on. The nice thing was, I now had a window into system activity with iPulse. It began showing a steady 100% CPU activity. Normally CPU activity is around 20 - 50%. I began shutting down applications, one by one, to see which one was causing the problem. When I had nothing running, I thought, hmmm... there's only one more thing. I did the Command-Option-Escape thing to bring up the "Force Quit Applications" window, and I "Relaunched" the Finder. Bingo! Problem solved. CPU activity dropped right down to about 10%, and within a few seconds the fan went off and the temperature became normal Warm instead of Hot. Interesting, eh?

It turns out I still have to reboot about every 5 - 7 days to keep the PowerBook operating relatively cool. If anyone out there knows why this is, please let me know.

Fan came on at 2:57 today. Processor cycles pegged at 100. I try quiting aps. Quit Neo. Drops to 20. Fan stops minutes later.

Tonight my powerbook left palm rest is so hot, it's unbearable. I have to put a pad of paper there or something just to be able to type. I have Word, InDesign, iTunes, Safari, and a few incidental things like printcenter, Preview and TextEdit running--also the battery is charging. Pretty bad design flaw. I saw one guy refer to it as the 12" PowerCook.

It's true. Remember that old New York saying: It's so hot you can fry eggs on the sidewalk. Same with this thing.

Hey, it's a feature!

Infoworld's Tom Yager, in mid April wrote a column about how his computer of choice for the moment is a 12" PowerBook. Then, just the other day, he announced that he would be switching his servers to Apple as well. His review of the 12" PowerBook is not uncritical. He complains about the heat, and the screen. I have to agree with him on the 12". To be perfectly honest: I'm finding the "warmth" on my left palm bothersome, and I've even considered using the foamy plastic packing bag that the 12" came in as a sort of insulating palm rest for my left hand. This is pretty bad, but true. I've never done the screen comparison that he suggests, but I do not doubt he is right. I seem to recall that a Dell screen looked nicer next to my PowerBook. I guess, all things considered, however, the 12" is a nice little package. I do remember the very first night I had it set up, my wife called out from the bedroom right next to where I work that she liked the keyboard better: it's a lot quieter than the ThinkPad. Easier to get to sleep while I work into the night.

Still, the bottom line is what Yager says: "Tracking the innovation coming from this dead, irrelevant company is wearing me out. If Apple is dead, it's the most productive corpse I've ever seen." I was drawn back to Apple for precisely this reason. The innovation coming from Apple now is right up there with the way it was in 1984 when the Mac first came out. Yaeger's points about what Apple is doing with Java and with the Safari web browser are huge. I, too, look forward to what is coming up next. Hopefully, If they bring out something a lot *cooler* (in all senses of the word) I can sell my 12" and cool off my left hand for not too much added cash.

My mac never crashes. Almost nothing ever goes wrong really, except for one thing: Word. Word on my Mac crashes all the time, almost every day. Yesterday I was working on a document at the office, and at one point, when I was doing nothing more innocuous than cutting and pasting, Word crashed. I yelled out "I hate Word!" My door was open and someone out in the hall chimed in, "So do I!" Anyway, I invested some time yesterday looking for a different OS-X Word processor. I'm looking for the best OS-X word processor. If I can just get rid of Word, I will be entirely Microsoft free.So I went on a search for a better OS-X Word processor. Here's what I found:

Nissus Writer

Wonderful intuitive interface, lovely screen display. Buggy. Opens .doc files strange: content is there, but lots of extra junk at beginning and end. My favourite so far for looks and ease of use. Opens fast. Easy to use: margins, fonts, etc. But no paragraph styles. Nice footer/header implementation. Nice columns implementation. When this one matures, if it ever does, it will become the standard.

Mellel

Does not open Word .doc files or save to .doc. Has odd page numbering interface. Nice styles implementation. Not as nice interface as Writer.

ThinkFree Office

All Java which makes it a bit halting to use at times and funky. Has scary online component--seems to want to register with mothership for every session. Does not recognize scroll wheel on mouse. Opens .doc files pretty good--better than others. Saves .doc format OK.

Z-Write

Can't open or save .doc files. Written in BASIC. Too lightweight.

AbiWord & OpenOffice

Need X11 windowing system to work. OpenOffice Takes a long time to load and is gigantic (171MB download!). Looks terrible on screen. Crashes as much or more than Word. But does open and save in .doc format. Because of X11 windowing system these word processors look terrible as they do not use anti-aliasing or the gorgeous Quartz rendering system, etc. Both crash A LOT! AbiWord Does not seem to have footers and headers. Both require extra helper applications to open files or to integrate with the Finder. So on balance, you need three applications: the word processor, the X11 system, and a launcher/integrator. All these are in Beta and all buggy.

Word

Lots of features. Poor screen display compared to other 'native-mac' word processors. For some unknown reason Word does not anti-alias text as do most other OS-X apps. Crashes more than other OS-X applications. Has all the necessary features when it does work, which is most of the time. Hence it remains the default standard. Possibly because of it's notorious history of crashing regularly, it has built in recovery capabilities that work well. Unfortunately, still the best alternative. (Sigh)

Not reviewed: Mariner.

Tested a whole bunch of shareware/freeware/demo sound recording software and settled on Sound Studio. It was easiest to use and has all the necessary features, and nothing more. The others (Audiorecorder, Audacity, AudioX) were all either missing something, or else I could not immediately figure out how to record or get playthrough or some other very simple thing. With Sound Studio everything just worked, or was obvious.

What I like about the Mac, compared to my old Thinkpad/Win2K box is that stuff just works. To record on the ThinkPad I always had to fiddle with OS settings and things. I must admit, after 6 years, I still never completely figured out how sound worked on the PC; how it was handled, which (of about 3) control panels controlled what, etc. And frankly, I never quite figured out how to *turn it on*. Or to be more exact. I did figure it out once, did some recording, but then could not figure it out again. Or at least I was not prepared to invest the time and aggravation to figure it out all over again. This seems to be the key difference. On the Mac, I just plugged in a tape player, tried the first thing, and it worked. (OK, maybe the second thing.) After getting the file into the Mac, I used iTunes to convert it to mp3. It took a minute to find the choice in the right menu, but it worked nicely.

Finally downloaded iTunes 4. Wow!! I'm not talking about buying music. After all, I'm in Canada, and the Apple Music Store is still not available outside USA. I'm talking about the rebirth of Napster. I just love the file sharing features of iTunes4. This is killer ap territory. No wonder articles are appearing everywhere from Time magazine to the New York Times, etc.

In the first week Apple had sold one million tunes. This is in one week, selling only to the Mac community. Let's project for a second. Assuming they open this up to the PC world of Windows, multiply by 20. Then multiply by 50 for the number of the weeks in the year (roughly). That's ONE BILLION dollars per year @ a dollar per song. I should think Apple is going to get at least 20% of that. Not bad, eh? And there are no moving parts.

But the music sharing thing is even more awesome. Check out this thread at MacRumors. It explains how you can capture songs from remote user's iTunes libraries. C|Net story here.

I tried this last night connecting to a friend's iBook using a free program from Sweden. (note: clicking on this immediately downloads the program.) It's quite amazing. You must know the IP address of the remote machine, but that's it. After you put that in, their entire (permitted) music libraries are open for the taking.

But that is beside the point. Having the music file is now academic, since essentially any recorded music, or even comedy routines (I listened to about an hour of George Carlin from some guy's machine in Philadelphia last night) is virtually on your own machine. With sites like iTuneShare.org and others, in a couple of clicks you have any thing you want, nearly. I just love it that my new Mac turns out to be a sort of Napster in disguise. Who would have thought? Actually iTunes4 has one of the best features of the old Napster: that ability to wander into people's "living rooms" and just browse their record collection. Listen to anything you want. Nice. This is Napster on steroids. Amazing. I'm listening to Ornette Coleman from a guy in New Jersey as I type. I don't own the music. I don't even *have* it. But I'm listening to it. This is why Apple is getting so much press on this. What a system. Windows can't touch this...yet.

Now the next question is...how long will it stay free?

I needed to convert a postscript file into a more readable format like pdf and in googling for a method I found I needed a little unix command line program called ps2pdf. I hoped it was native in OS-X already, but it wasn't. A bit more sleuthing and it appeared that I had to finally install Fink to get it. I've known about Fink, an application that allows you to install the huge world of Linux and Unix OpenSource software for use in OS-X and I always knew I'd be playing with Fink one day. Well the time has come.

When you do the basic Fink install, you get ps2pdf automatically, along with a ton of other little Unix things. It was not that hard. The hardest part, (which was actually pretty easy--and harkened back to old DOS days) was setting a path to the /usr/local/bin directory in the .cshrc file so that the Mac could find ps2pdf and all the other goodies installed by Fink.

I then was able to very quickly convert the .ps file into a .pdf file. Did not have to use Acrobat distiller or anything. Very nice.

I thought Fink was pretty neat, so I decided to google "Fun with Fink" and discovered that a guy named Phil Lavigna has pre-published a complete book on Fink, and OpenSource software for Mac OS-X. You can (Warning: 21.4MB) download Fun With Fink from Phil's website. Amazing. If you've ever wanted a nice illustrated step by step guide to Unix on Mac OS-X check this out. Phil's book is all about how to turn your mac into a linux (Xdarwin) box with every popular kind of desktop environment such as KDE and Gnome, so it's questionable how useful this is, since the basic OSX Aqua interface is already somewhat better than any of these. However, as a straightforward introduction to this sort of thing, it's pretty nice. And free.