Re: new pc finally arrived and have to make decisions-help

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

> My "just works" moment was one where i plugged in my SVHS camcorder, into
> a VHS=>Firewire box, fired up iMovie for the first time, and created an
> edited video (from footage taken that afternoon), with songs and audio and
> titles, using only the on screen help, for my now Nephews 3rd birthday.
I have found that Macs are superior in regard to hardware, but not
necessarily software. For instance, you plug in ethernet, and there's
network. No dialogue boxes even flash by. Pretty much the same with
attaching a printer. Firewire drives "just work" when attached. OTOH, XP is
much better at accepting new hardware than 98 was.
But I decided not to go with Mac because a) the ibook G4 was a little
sluggish, b) not all the software was so just-worksy. GarageBand was the
final straw.
> [Xywrite has] spoiled me to what other wordprocessors can provide with
> regard to speed, flexibility and configurability.
Just a few days ago, I had to change footnote numbers in Word for an
article I'd written. 74 footnotes, most of which needed fixing. Now,
granted, the footnotes had not been put in automatically with Word's
autonumber facility. But how was I supposed to change footnotes 17 to 73 to
now be 18 to 74? Couldn't figure it out--is it just my ignorance, or is
this symptomatic of what Word is, or rather what Word isn't? I had to do it
by hand.
> One of the big advantantages of OS X, and the second reason i left windows
> behind, was this Unix environment.
That's what motivated me to try the Mac. But it seemed to me, in my perhaps
ignorance, that UNIX doesn't play the same role in the Mac as DOS did in
Win9x. For instance, the UNIX directory structure didn't seem to relate in
any easy way to the structure I saw in normal Mac usage.
I think that if I'd had a Mac guru at hand to show me everything, I might
have stuck with Mac. But I didn't, and the learning curve was steeper than
I had anticipated.


Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx