Sunday, December 27, 2009

The new MacBook Pro

I am in the midst of setting up my MacBook Pro (13") which replaces my four-year-old 12" Titanium PowerBook. The Titanium had pretty much recovered from The Cat Pee incident, but it wasn't able to run Snow Leopard. As I'm now commuting to Olympia, I needed a reliable laptop, and I want to be able to use Snow Leopard's "Back to My Mac" feature to access the iMac at home.

First impressions:
  • The new environmentally aware packaging is pretty elegant for cardboard. It was nice not to wrassle with a lot of plastic wrapping.
  • I like the magnetic power cord (not new on MacBooks, but new for me).
  • I love the backlit keyboard (again, not new for MacBooks, but new for me — I remember when this was just for the highest-end models).
  • Choosing an account photo made me smile — I recognized several of the images (flowers) from the early iCards galleries I worked with.
  • The screen seems wide, but not very tall.
  • The new track pad with one, two, three and four-finger controls looks intriguing.
  • I noticed that I will have been a member of .Mac (Mobile Me) for 10 years come Valentine's Day.
  • The set-up, including settings and a complete sync of mail, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, via Mobile Me was complete 30 minutes from when I opened the shipping box.
All that remains is to install Microsoft Office, iWork '09, Yojimbo (which syncs), and Storyist.

Tomorrow.

5 comments:

  1. The track pad sounded like my Fingerworks keyboard (see http://www.fingerworks.com/userguides.html) -- not surprising since the creator of my keyboard is widely rumored to have been hired by Apple a few years ago. So I looked up the track pad. I found that it doesn't yet have the editing gestures I rely on, but I bet they are coming. I dread my Fingerworks keyboard dying someday; the same technology on a Mac might just get me to cross the Great Divide.

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    1. Great post! One of my 2 cats (both neutered males) had taken to painting all of my walls, furniture, and anything else he could reach. I was horrified when I got a UV light. He never did that in all of the 9 years I've had him and didn't when I got him a buddy (they love each other and did so right away) but when a strange black cat started showing up outside both of my cats went nuts and the older one (9) started his wall painting, as well as the curtains out in the kitty room. I couldn't keep up with it.

      My cats are indoor cats so it's not like the stray is actually going to get in here but they both hate him (and he is weird...my neighbor's cats hate him too). I've tried cleaning with a pet urine enzyme and then spraying some "No More Spraying" but that hasn't worked.

      He's a sneaky little bugger too; he waits until he thinks I'm not looking and then does it. He's learned that the minute I see him backing his butt up to something he gets yelled at. It wasn't until I found "Cat Spraying No More" that I was able to finally get rid of this tiresome behavior. Now my house doesn't smell like a litter box anymore :)

      Here's a link the their site if you're interested in checking it out, I highly recommend this: http://nomorecatpee.com

      Jane

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  2. Thanks for tipping me off to Storyist. It looks really handy. Mac only, though... Hmmm...

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  3. Having similar fun setting up my new i7 iMac. Menumeters gives me a meter for each CPU thread so I have 8 meters strung out across my Menubar. Going to go with the single average meter to get back some real estate.

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  4. Having similar fun setting up my new i7 iMac. Menumeters gives me a meter for each CPU thread so I have 8 meters strung out across my Menubar. Going to go with the single average meter to get back some real estate.

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