Two weeks into eMac ownership and the sheen has worn off.
Well, no. I'm lying.
I'm still getting a kick out of using it, and discovering new features all the time; like how I can plug my PowerShot camera straight in without installing any additional software, and like how I can use the Summarize feature of TextEdit to strip all of the white space out of a pasted web article.
Two weeks in, and I'm still blown away by the quality of the display. This is the first computer I've used where Times New Roman-style fonts actually look good on the screen. Okay—it's not a complete love-fest; there are one or two minor issues I'd like to resolve: I really appreciate how it only takes three seconds to sleep it and three seconds to wake it up, only every time it wakes the screen contrast is high and I then need to tap either F14 or F15 to have it remember how it was.
In IE6 I could easily look in the Temporary Internet Files folder and copy out any SWF or MOV files I might want to keep—I wouldn't have the faintest idea where Safari keeps its cache. IE also had a feature where you hit F11 and it's full-screen; so did Outlook and Explorer. I really miss that.
Lastly, I cannot find a way to go on and offline (yes, I'm one of the few still using dialup) without using the mouse. Minor issues like I said; they're not deal-breakers, just open items for now. It's still early days...
After three weeks...
It was time I fired up the old PC to see if there was anything I'd forgotten to transfer over. There were about 500 megs of video and music files that I decided to snatch. I don't know why, but the CD burner on the PC decided not to cooperate, so I used the card reader and an SD card instead.
It took forever to get the files into the card (using USB 1.1) and only about a tenth of the time to get it off, using USB 2.0. I started to delete the files from the card using the Mac but that was taking a long time so I cancelled that and waited until the card was back in the Pocket PC and did it there.
I suspect that the Mac was building a trash can on the card and moving the files there. I don't know, I could be wrong. I have seen new strange looking files on the card before after it's been looked at by the Mac. So now my new rule is to drop files to and from the card and PDA, but tidying up chores are more easily handled from the PDA.
I'm sure that if Apple swallowed hard and developed their own PDA this would be all the more elegant. Stranger things have happened.
The only clumsiness I experienced going back to the PC was closing Windows. I'd gotten so used to the left-handed Mac that I kept single clicking top left which would just bring up a window control menu in Windows. Getting back to the Mac, I'm getting more and more used to file management. I really missed the two-pane tree and files layout of Windows until I caught onto populating the favorites pane in Finder with all my usual folders.
Two things are particularly elegant about this system: One is that no matter how many items are in the left hand pane—they resize beautifully in order to fit within the chosen size of window (within reason). The other is the spring-loaded folders system. I never get tired of how cool, and convenient, it is to drag a downloaded file from the desktop onto the hard drive and have the window snap open—wait until I drop the file onto a destination—then snap shut again.
No biggie; but big enough to be super-useful.
So I'm whittling away at some minor post-switch frustrations. My current one is making dialog box choices using only the keyboard. Duh! I only just this minute realized that you tab to the option you want then press the spacebar. New Task: Find a keyboard shortcut FAQ and laminate it...