A tale of puzzlement and discovery
Step 0: A foreword
I'm writing all of this in English as it's the language that most people on the network speak (unless the filters in China are suddenly dropped). However, it's written mostly in English, not US English, so don't bug me with "colour", it's the way lightwaves in visible light are named in English. Look it up. It is however possible that colonial spelling might have crept in here and there.
Secondly, I'm not a native speaker, so there might be grammatical or stylistic mistakes here and there. Just count yourself lucky that you aren't reading this through Babelfish and that I made the effort at all.
Flames will be archived in /dev/null for future reference as per tradition.
Oh and this belongs on my website, if you're reading it elsewhere, you probably should head to www.fredshome.org for the real thing and assorted crap.
Step 1: Hardware
So I got a 12" iBook. It's cheap (well at about 1200€ with a couple extras it's not very expensive as notebooks go), it's small, it has a great battery life at that price range and it runs some kind of Unix which just works. Or so the commercials say.
Plus I got tired of fighting laptops with Linux. You never know if the WiFi chipset is revision B1 (which is supported) or B4 (which isn't) and the salesperson doesn't even know what a chipset is. Of course, you could give it a try, spend three days installing the system and hunting for tips on the network and then send the machine back for a refund (at your expense, thank you very much), or you can get a machine that just works and that (supposedly) runs Unix software. Or of course you could also get one of the insanely overpriced Linux laptops with a battery life of about 75 minutes that are sold here and there in neon colours.
So anyway I went with Apple. I figured it would be fun to explore a new system, and it would be comfortable to also be able to use my regular stuff. Those articles relate my exciting adventures as I lay my hands on a Mac for the first time since the late 80s (no, really). Those who lack a Unix background may not always get what I'm talking about, but then I don't usually get what Windows users are talking about either so fair's fair...
I'm writing this in TextEdit. It's roughly the equivalent of Write in Windows, I can't really think of something in Unix that would be like it since we usually either have text editors or full word processors but not half-assed programs that stand in between. Well, actually it would be the equivalent of Write done properly. It feels like a comfortable little editor when Write always felt clunky. Or maybe it's because I remember the early versions of Write, I think I never even started the ones that shipped with NT 5.x. It might have gotten better now. Or maybe not. After all I tried their new version of paint and even though it finally appears to be 24 bit capable (it might even handle alpha, I haven't looked into it that hard), it still feels clunky. Gimp users who suddenly stumble on a copy of xpaint which is still installed with most distributions and who run it out of nostalgia will know just what I mean.
Step 2: software
Ok, I got OpenOffice.org installed. This required X11 which was thoughtfully provided on the system CD (although not installed by default). The Mac OS version of OOo isn't up to date but seems to run ok and that's good enough for me. OOo is my major workhorse where writing is concerned so this was an essential step.
Step 3 and onwards: What do I need steps for anyway ?
iIndex useless stuff
Essential addition to the new machine, a spotlight plugin now indexes OOo files. It's in Beta though so your mileage may vary. In theory it's also Open Document ready. Look for NeoLight from the NeoOffice people on the Apple Spotlight plugin repository at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/neolightneoofficespotlig.... So now I can find stuff inside the meta-information of my OOo files (which I never fill anyway). It makes me feel warm inside.
Quartzification
I have now installed NeoOffice/J which is supposedly a "quartzification" (quartz is the Apple graphical layer) of OOo 1.4. However most of the quartzifiers (the people who ported the software) website is filled with whining about how understaffed they are and how difficult life is. So while their software is nice and all (and apparently has a Java based interface, hence the /J) it might not be around for much longer. Or maybe they're just whiners. Apart from that the regular OOo works fine as well. Although it typically lags one or two versions behind the main branch. So on a general basis it sucks a bit but it's not dramatic, at least not to me since this isn't my main box.
This being said, older versions aren't necessarily bad. They'll often use less RAM and CPU cycles for example. Anyway I removed OOo and now use NO/J. I'll switch back if needed.
Dr Watson, please take him back to the institution
I had first heard about Sherlock, uh, some time ago. And I just found it installed among the more recent apps. So I gave it a try. Well, frankly, maybe it was great in 1987 or whenever it came out, but nowadays Google does better faster, and it works on any connected machine. Now apparently you can add plugins to make it better. I'm not sure it's worth the hassle though.
What's wrong with those people ?
Mac applications seem to always have idiotic names. Like "GruntHogMaster" (or something like that) for a newsreader. I've also got a DVD ripper called "HandBrake". Frankly when you've installed a few of those, how are you supposed to remember what the hell it is they do ? Luckily You can add spotlight hints to a file. So after you install HogGrunter, add "newsreader Usenet" as spotlight keywords. Then just search for Usenet or newsreader and it will pop-up. It takes about the same time as browsing the apps folder anyway. Of course since Grunt thing is a time limited shareware, I removed it after a couple days. I think I'll just use Thunderbird or find a Unix reader that doesn't require too many libs. HogNewsWhatever isn't a bad newsreader by the way, just not my style.
Interface fun
The Mac interface takes some getting used to. Especially the "menu isn't with the window" thing. Having the menu at the top of the screen is indeed convenient, especially with a trackpad (I hate trackpads) but I keep closing windows without closing applications and end up with a bunch of windowless apps hanging around by themselves doing nothing. Of course, I suppose that closing the application when the last window exits wouldn't make much sense (although apparently single windowed apps are supposed to act that way) so I got used to Command-Q-ing quite a bit (I have trouble remembering what all those keyboard symbols mean, I think the propeller/apple one is "command", I still haven't figured what the hell the underscore_with_a_caret_underneath one is for though, it certainly doesn't get used much).