By Toxin

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Chapter Five
In which the author nearly strangles Auntie, scans and prints a train ticket, fixes his mouse buttons, and draws some conclusions...

Auntie must die!

The BBC streams its radio broadcasts online, as do many other radio stations. I fancied some Radio 4, as is my wont. On Windows I've got the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack installed, which includes an alternative to the official Real player software. Maybe Real's product has improved but, after the horrid experience I had with it a few years ago, I had no intention of giving it another chance. Sadly, however, there did not appear to be a Mac equivalent of Real Alternative. It looked as if my only choice was to install that dreaded Real software after all. Ugh.

Still, no Real, no Radio 4. Just how badly did I want to listen to I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue? Badly enough, as it happened. I gave in and downloaded Real Player. I guess it has improved, or maybe the Mac version was never as unashamedly ropey as the Windows version. Even so, the only alternative offered by the BBC was Windows Media. I can download Windows Media Player 9 for OS X if I desire, but I don't and probably never will. Why Auntie can't just stream in MP3, OGG or other useful codec I don't know.

Manual? We don't need no stinking manual!

By this point I was feeling brave. Some might call it foolhardy, but I prefer brave. Epson's website had drivers for my scanner and inkjet printer, and HP's website had drivers for my laser printer. Armed with all three sets of drivers I decided to throw caution to the winds and install the .dmg packages without reading any instructions.

All three packages installed without any obvious hitches, so I connected the three USB cables to my USB hub, and connected the hub to the Mac. Nothing happened. No “Add New Hardware Wizard” or similar window appeared. All was silent. I thought for a moment, and guessed that, since OS X is so much more polished than Windows, the hardware had been installed, calmly and quietly in the background. And so a quick trip to System Preferences proved.

My inkjet printer was configured in the Print & Fax option, but there was no sign of my laser printer. Reinstalling the driver helped not one jot. So much for my bravery, or foolhardiness. Eventually, after racking my brain and searching HP's website and Google, I finally thought to check the cables. The light for that socket on my USB hub wasn't lit. I swapped the cable to another socket, the light illuminated, and the printer appeared almost immediately in the list.

I couldn't see anything obvious in System Preferences for my scanner, an equivalent of Scanners and Cameras in Windows. The next place to look was Applications, in case there was a suitable program already present. And there was. The Epson package had installed something called Epson Scan, which looked and felt remarkably like the Epson TWAIN utility on Windows. Not only that, but the Mac came with a program called Image Capture. Not having anything interesting to hand, I put an old train ticket on the platen and scanned an image of it.

Printing was a simple matter of going to the File -> Print dialog, choosing the appropriate printer, and clicking OK. I now have an enlarged colour print of my train ticket, and an enlarged monochrome one, too. It couldn't have been simpler. My LaserJet also has a JetDirect network printing box attached to it. OS X supports printing over a variety of protocols, including JetDirect, so I'll be able to remove the USB cable and put the printer back on the network, where it belongs. But that's for another time.

Back and to the left

My mouse is a Logitech MX510. In addition to the typical left and right buttons and scroll wheel, the mouse features buttons for navigation both forwards and back, scrolling up and down, and switching between applications. I'd become used to, that is, dependent on, the forwards and back buttons, and realised that they were no longer working. This could be a show-stopper. But not for long, since a quick trip to Logitech's website elicited a suitable OS X driver for the MX510. This, when installed, added a new item to System Preferences: Logitech Control Center. This restored life to my beloved buttons and they all behaved as they did before.

Conclusions

It's been six days now since the Mac Mini arrived. In that time I've been able to browse the Web, send and receive e-mail, write this series of articles, play Jardinains 2, use FTP, use IRC, listen to online radio, and use my scanner and printers. I've even downloaded the Fracture screensaver (a bargain at $10), Google Earth, and Stuffit Expander, a free program to extract files from Mac-only archives (usually identified by the .sea or .sit extension). In short, I've managed to accomplish almost everything a typical Windows user would want to accomplish. I've still not managed to get my webcam or external hard disk to work properly, but I'm still digging around the Internet in an attempt to find the answers I seek.

Was it easy to make the switch? Yes, actually, it was. All the hurdles I encountered were surmountable without much effort. All I had to do was think about what I wanted to accomplish and how I might go about doing so. For example, my thought process when adjusting the display resolution ran thus: What do I want to do? Increase the display resolution. How would I do that in Windows? Either right-click on the Desktop or go into Control Panel. The former doesn't work; what's the equivalent of Control Panel? System Preferences. What item in System Preferences would let me make the change I want to make? And so on. I broke down each task into small steps. If I wasn't sure if there was a suitable program for a particular function, all I had to do was browse the Applications folder.

In the course of digging through the various applications and System Preferences settings I've discovered many, many different things I need to study in more detail, to really get the most from it. It comes with a built-in web server, FTP server, SSH server, and more. It has a software firewall to restrict inbound access to specific services. It has a scripting engine for automating tasks. It comes with something called Dashboard, imitated in the Windows world as Konfabulator. I'm not yet convinced of the utility of it. Maybe other people will find it useful, but I gave up on Konfabulator after I realised that it was sitting there, eating up resources, and I was doing nothing useful with it. OS X comes with a myriad of keyboard shortcuts, which I must spend time learning. The mouse is all very well, but I don't have three arms. It's more efficient to keep both hands on the keyboard than to move one constantly between the keyboard and mouse. OS X also has, as one might expect, a suite of accessibility features, called Universal Access, which offers voice prompts, zoom, colour inversion, sticky keys, visual prompts for audio events, and more.

Would the Mac Mini be suitable for a novice? This question is difficult to answer, as I have to remember that my couple of decades' use of Microsoft products also drilled into me a familiarity with more general computing concepts. I expect a GUI to work in a certain way, but my expectations are built on my long experience. What may be intuitive to me might not be intuitive to someone who's not “computer-literate”. That said, as a seasoned user of Windows, I can appreciate how much more, well, polished the Mac experience was. It was more welcoming, more friendly, than Windows has been, and that may be all the difference that is needed to persuade a novice to pick this over an alternative.

Will I get rid of my Windows machines? Probably not. There are too many games that I play which run only on Windows, and which require a more powerful video adapter than the integrated Intel graphics in the Mac Mini. I am aware of Boot Camp, the tool which permits one to install an alternate operating system such as Windows or Linux, but have not yet explored it. My surround-sound speakers require a sound card with three sockets (front, centre, rear), the Mac has only a single socket, and I don't feel the need to purchase yet another set of speakers. I'll stick with the perfectly adequate stereo set currently connected. I work daily with Windows; sometimes I like to bring my work home and puzzle out a scripting problem in the comfort of my own living room rather than under the harsh glare of the office fluorescent lights, or curl up with a study guide for my training. That said, for general computing tasks, I will certainly stick with the Mac. It's just as capable, and a good deal more quiet, than the Windows box on which it sits.

Why pick OS X over Windows or Linux? Ease of use, and security. I can't help but think of OS X as “what Windows wants to be when it grows up”. So my webcam and hard disk didn't work first time with OS X? Not every Windows hardware installation is seamless, either. The rest of the experience was pleasurable. Finding my way around was simple, too. Working out what I wanted to do and how to do it wasn't an exercise in abstract thinking. I tried Linux, several times, and was unable to stick with it. Too much thought was required for what I wanted to accomplish; the return-to-effort ratio was too low.

OS X may or may not be more secure than Windows from a programming perspective, but it is more secure from a statistical perspective: fewer people use it. Windows is the mainstream operating system, and so it is the one most targeted by ne'er-do-wells. That is not to say that malicious software does not (or will not) exist for the Macintosh, but it is far less prevalent. Even so, I should give thought to obtaining some anti-virus software. Sensible computing practices ought to keep me safe, but I would feel more comfortable with a safety net against the time when I inevitably make a mistake.

My computers sit behind a separate firewall and NAT router, so the requirement for an inbound software firewall is minimal. There appears to be no outbound firewall function, and so I must investigate that as well. I run a software firewall on my Windows machines so that I may be alerted if a program wants to connect to the Internet, potentially against my wishes. I might inadvertently put some spyware onto my system, for example. I would like a similar safety net on this machine, too.

While on the subject of spyware, I should investigate the Mac equivalents of trusty tools such as HijackThis!, Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, Spyware Doctor, and the like, just in case. I should also look into pop-up window blocking; there may be something built into Safari, or I may have to switch to Firefox even though it does not use the OS X UI to render its controls. Maybe Opera is a suitable alternative. Pop-up windows may not necessarily be a security risk, but they are jolly annoying and so I wish to avoid them.

The experience hasn't been perfect. The main niggle was the US/UK keyboard layout mess at the beginning. I must take Apple to task over that, because it really is inexcusable. That is one thing which Windows does correctly and has done since its inception, and can't be particularly difficult to solve. Perhaps the next release of OS X, version 10.5, will fix it.

What does the future hold? For now, I'll spend time learning even more about my new toy, especially the command shell. Eventually I can see myself acquiring more Apple computers, the next one most likely being a laptop. The confidence gained by having the courage to learn OS X may even lead me to reconsider Linux. Of course, by that time, it's possible that there will be a Linux distribution as polished as OS X, and so the transition may be equally easy.

I'm very glad I took the plunge. Despite my initial fears, it was surprisingly easy. I made the switch; will you?

The author would like to thank long-term community member OhioArt2 for providing the title to these pieces.

Copyright © by LWD All Rights Reserved.

Published on: 2007-02-26 (2580 reads)