…how I'm getting on with the new Mac, having left the Wonderful World o' Windows behind last Friday night.
In a word, fabulously!
In all honesty, it was a little touchy "the morning after." I had a brief, "My God what have I done?" moment Saturday afternoon while attempting to do something that was rote, second nature to me on my Windows box and it was causing me no end of frustration. Ben, sensing my mounting aggravation, suggested we go to Borders and see what kind of books might be available to help ease me through the transition.
I picked up Switching to the Mac, and it has been incredibly helpful in navigating the familiar, yet strangely back-assward-to-what-I'm-used-to way of life on the new machine. I know I have to be patient with myself; I've been on Windows for the last 20 years; I've been on the Mac only 4 days.
But I have to say, now that I've calmed down and have a decent reference book at my fingertips (so I'm not constantly bothering Ben with "How do I…" questions) I'm back to totally loving it. I'm using Entourage for email, and while it was a bit of a pain to bring all my data over from Outlook and its feature set is nowhere near as rich, last night I was doing something on it and caught myself thinking, "Why doesn't Outlook do this? (Microsoft is supposedly returning Outlook to the Mac platform in their 2010 Office for Mac release. Go figger.)
It was also a very rude awakening on Monday when i went back to work and had to deal with Dell again. For the first time in my life their construction (which had always impressed me, especially in relation to other manufacturers and the slew of home-brew clones I'd lived with over the last two decades) now really seemed flimsy and hacked together.
Last night I found a free VNC server application for Mac, and while I haven't had a chance to test it from the office, I have used it successfully on my local home network, so if I can verify that it will allow me to connect to home from work, my old Dell Inspiron can be retired and given a much needed rest. (I'm not going to get rid of it; I bought it from Ben about a year ago and it does have a certain amount of sentimental value.)
The only thing I had been outright missing from my Windows box until this evening was ThumbsPlus, an incredibly full-featured graphics cataloging/editing program that I've been using for at least the dozen or so years. But Adobe's Bridge comes close, and since I just learned how to change the default image viewer from Photoshop to the built-in Mac Previewer in Bridge, this may not even be an issue any more.