Mac'ified

Now that I finally gave into temptation and bought a 12" PowerBook and have been using it for a week, I can happily say that I'm actually more happy with it than I though I would be (and I was pretty gung ho in the first place). And for someone who's in the past looked at Mac's as the Volvo of computers, that's a happy thing to be able to say.

So many people have waxed lyrical about their conversion to Mac-land, and I don't intend to add to that, not least of all because I'm still using XP as my primary desktop OS so haven't really "converted" at all. And there's that horrible taint of the really religious Mac zealots who assume anyone willingly using anything else must be retarded or unfit to live, or at the very least in need of some pitying condescension.

However, I do see why people have such regard for the platform, because every little thing on the Mac feels like someone spent weeks obsessing over just the right way to work, look, feel and act. Everything indeed seems to Just Work. And not only just work, but give you that nice fuzzy feeling of working so well that you're sure you'll discover even more stuff later.

Things to like:

• Fonts. The Mac's fonts are truly a work of art. Even on a relatively low-res 1024 x 768 screen they look gorgeous even at 10pt. I thought I would miss XP's ClearType, and indeed the Mac's fonts do look a little blurred compared to XP's, but they are also far more elegantly shaped and don't have the vaguely irritating red tinge around the edges that ClearType generates. Even the Windows fonts that Office installs look better on the Mac than on Windows.
  
• Exposé. Let's not mince words: Exposé. Is. Fucking. Fantastic. I used to think it was a neat trick, now it's my main method of navigating through windows. I can slam the mouse up to the left corner to show all, hit F11 to show the desktop, or F10 to show what windows an app has open atm. The dock has simply become a way to launch apps, not to navigate them.
  
• Consistent key shortcuts. On a laptop these are a godsend. Close a window option-W, kill app option-Q, next app window, option-left, prefs option-,. Yes Windows apps often have equivalents, but not always, especially when flipping between app windows.
  
• Security. When apps need to do something that needs root, the system pops up a dialog and asks for a password - you don't need to take the risk of running with admin privileges all the time. There is a protected system-wide "keychain" for storing passwords. You can FileVault-encrypt your home directory, making me much happier about letting the system store passwords and other info like email that I'd hate anyone to get if the thing gets stolen.
  
• Safari. I thought I'd use Firefox, but Safari is cool enough that I haven't yet. The only thing I miss are extensions like Adblock.
  
• It just looks cool :) Everything in the UI is antialiased and looks like it's made by skilled glassblowers :) Things slide around rather than snap about as they do on XP. You get the feeling that the platform is so powerful underneath that cools things are easier to do than boring ones.
• It runs Eclipse very nicely.