It’s not all sunshine and smiles in Happy Apple Land. Marc Logemann has posted a list of top ten things that he hates about the Mac. The one that got me was adv. Mouse settings only adjustable by 3rd party shareware apps. Surely not! Apple-heads, tell me it’s not true!!!

To be fair, he’s also posted a list of 10 things he loves about his Mac. I’m particularly pleased to see startup scheduling for tasks like nightly backup. I was wondering if the Mac could do this.

Really it all depends on what you want to use your computer for, and what your expectations are, I suppose.

If you’re a Mac user, would you agree with these top 10 lists? What do you really love or hate about your Mac?

One thing I find slightly weird about Macs is that you apparently can’t maximize windows easily. Why would you not want to use all your screen space for the task you’re working on? Controversial topic I know. I’m sure I’ll get used to the Mac way soon enough.

(on a totally unrelated note: this Quicksilver thingy looks great!)

One thing I’m really looking forward to when I get my new Mac is to be able to use some great multimedia software again. Multimedia on Linux is, well, not quite there yet! Don’t get me wrong – it’s come a long way in the last 8 years, especially in the areas of sound editing (Audacity), digital audio workstations (Ardour), sequencers (MusE) and video editing (Cinelerra). But most of these apps still lack the stability and polish of the commercial offerings on Mac and Windows.

You also can’t run Reason on Linux. I love Reason and have been putting off buying the latest version (v3) until I bought a new PC powerful enough to run it! Things were looking dodgy for Intel Macs for a while as Reason (like most current Mac software) is PowerPC based, and its performance on Intel Macs under Rosetta is supposed to be pretty poor. However, the Props have recently announced that Reason will be released as a Universal Binary. Woo-hoo! That’s another thing for the shopping list then. 🙂

Parallels Workstation is another reason that I’ve finally decided to get a Mac. I really need to run Windows, Mac OS and Linux at the same time to do browser testing for stuff like the PageKits, and ideally I want to do it all on one machine (space is limited in my little office). Well now for the first time I can, thanks to this nifty bit of software and also Apple’s move to Intel.

For the above reason I’m not really interested in Boot Camp (rebooting just to test a website in Windows would be a right pain), but Parallels Workstation fits the bill perfectly. Judging by this Macworld review, it’s pretty speedy and easily capable of running the 3 operating systems at once.

Yay! No more nagging Si to test PageKits in Mac browsers. Parallels will be on my shopping list as soon as (a) it’s out of beta and (b) my wallet has recovered from buying the Mac. I’ll also need to get myself a copy of Windows XP of course (Home edition should do the trick). My poor bank account!

iChat AV is one of the reasons I want a Mac. Si and I have regular weekly conferences to catch up on ELATED and other work stuff, and we’ve tried everything from Egika / OhPhoneX (where do they get these weird and wonderful names from!) through to Skype and Gizmo.

They all work after a fashion, but none of them particularly elegantly. I just tried getting Ekiga up and running after a recent Debian upgrade, but I can’t get the pwc driver for my webcam to compile without chucking incomprehensible error messages on the screen, so I guess that’s a non-starter unless I want to muck around for half a day.

Skype and Gizmo aren’t bad and at least don’t involve mucking about with firewall configs, but they’re audio-only on Mac and Linux (video coming to Skype on Mac soon I hear), and on Gizmo Si sounds like he’s rustling a plastic bag every time he talks. (He swears he’s not.). His Skype also has a nasty habit of crashing his Mac. Also tried OpenWengo but again – audio only on the Mac. Though it does work pretty well.

iChat AV (if it works as advertised) will be great – plug & play, excellent full-screen quality and 4 way video chats. (though I still reckon the latency between Australia and the UK might be slightly annoying.)

Now I just need to convince my Dad in Italy, who moved from Mac to PC a couple of years ago, to move back to a Mac so I can iChat with him too! 😀