glazmac
By glazou on Monday 24 November 2008, 16:33 - Mac - Permalink
Things I love in my MBP:
- the overall design and hardware quality (if you except the heat of the carter close to the right bottom of the screen when I build a debug build of xulrunner, I found only one issue : when you insert an ExpressCard, the blocking click happens too late. If like me you want to use an expresscard to read SD cards, it's really hard to push your card far enough in the mac)
- the incredible quality of the iSight cam compared to what I had in my Sony laptop; and that one was already good.
- Parallels. I started with a trial version but it's worth every penny.
- the battery life.
Things I like:
- the quality of the keyboard
- the glossy screen, although I haven't tried yet outside of my flat or the office
- the new touchpad, very very cool
Things I dislike:
- the french mac keyboard just totally sucks when you're a developer. Key combinations are needed for {}[] \ and | and that's a bit painful when you code
- more important, the metallic edge of the palmrest is a bit too sharp and it's slowly shaving a portion of my skin at the bottom of both arms... When the bone becomes visible, I'll sue Apple :-)
- I miss the delete key and the page up and page down keys.
- I really miss the ability to resize a window from any edge or corner.
- iPhoto is very slow when it imports a laaaarge image library. Roughly twenty times slower than Picasa...
Things I hate:
- gdb...
Things that surprised me:
- the HD is a 1.8" Toshiba and I can hear clicks coming from it ; it's probably the most fragile part of this laptop.
- the cpu fan is not of the best quality ever...
- MacPorts installation broke once, twice, and only third attempt (I manually set CC env variable) installed it correctly. Yeah, I know, I found afterwards it's a known issue but still, very surprising.
- I just updated the touchpad driver. I must say I did not have a single issue with that touchpad even before updating.
- the USB ports are on the left hand side; when you use your right hand for an external mouse, it's not very convenient unless you have a wireless mouse.
- Thunderbird surprised me too: first the junk mail controls did not work at all because it was a fresh install from scratch. There's a bug about this in bugzilla. I managed to have emails manually tagged as junk be moved to my Junk folder but other things are still broken. I also miss the incoming email notification in the windows version of Thunderbird. There's probably an extension meeting my wishes.
- context menus do not work inside the menupopups of Firefox's personal toolbar. A bit painful when you want to delete a bookmark there.
- lack of a good MSN Messenger client with full video and audio support. Fortunately, Parallels makes it easy to use the builtin iSight with Windows MSN Messenger.
- the max angle between the keyboard and the screen is only 135°.
Comments
I don't really think the HD is a 1.8" one. Maybe in the MacBook Air but not in the MacBook and MacBook Pro series.
And I'm totally agree with you with the french keyboard. I bought my first mac more than two years ago and I still don't get used to it.
delete key ? S'il s'agit “vers l'avant” “Maj-Effacer” le fait mais pas dans tous les softs. Ça marche très bien dans BBEdit, indispensable pour un développeur ; à mon avis. Page-up et down "fn-flèche droite ou gauche”, et aussi : “Commande-flèche haute ou basse”.
For email notifications on Thunderbird, you may want to try "Growl notifications" on AMO. Growl is near-essential on Mac OS X, imho.
Concernant gdb, le plugin CDT pour Eclipse est bien intégré avec le gdb fourni avec xcode (source debugger, breakpoints...). A noter que cela marche aussi bien avec gdb sous Linux.
> the cpu fan is not of the best quality ever...
Et chaque compilation déclenchera le ventilateur ;)
> Thunderbird surprised me too
Bizarre, parce que les fichiers sont compatibles Mac/PC, il suffisait de tout copier.
> lack of a good MSN Messenger
A mon goût, le meilleu produit qui permette de l'excellente Video/Audio Mac/PC est Skype... Mais il faut convertir ses interlocuteurs :D
> the new touchpad, very very cool
Avec deux doigts... Je ne m'en passe plus, et ça me manque sur les autres ordis (ou vieux macs).
>gdb...
Avec XCode ? On dispose d'une interface graphique tout de même assez puissante, même si son projet n'est pas "XCode" (mon cas).
Jeter un petit coup de test à cette merveille de simplicité et d'efficactié :
http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/produ...
> I really miss the ability to resize a window from any edge or corner.
And when I'm not with linux I miss the ability to resize a window using alt + middle click anywhere in the window...
># the HD is a 1.8" Toshiba and I can hear clicks coming from it ; it's probably the most fragile part of this laptop.
Must do: Use Time Machine with a big hd. It works well alone and it will save your ass.
ah aussi… pour thunderbird et spotlight
http://oduinn.com/2008/08/02/how-to...
For delete : Fn + backspace will the work.
For page up/down : Fn + up/down.
I also consider the french mac keyboard lame for programming, but somehow I got used to it.
JP Morgan reads the Glazblog! http://www.appleinsider.com/article...
You are the first programmer I know who bought a Mac with a french keyboard :(... A solution at the office is to plug the MBP to an external screen and a full US keyboard. I learned to love the Apple USB aluminum keyboard (the wired version, not the wireless which doesn't have a keypad). My previous one was an old click-click Apple Extended Keyboard with ADB/USB converter. I changed earlier this year and I don't miss it.
Some other things I miss :
- no Alt-click anywhere inside a window to move it (I really got used to that with linux) ;
- Fn+left/right doesn't work in input fields in Firefox (3.0.4)
- No history browsing in Firefox using 3 fingers on the trackpad like in Safari/Finder...
- At first I couldn't figure out how to rename a file (no menu item and Alt-F2 doesn't work). I had to use the Terminal for that...
- No equivalent to KDE's ioslaves. In particular, I really really miss the fish:/ one.