Well, this has been one heck of a week for me. On Monday I got an iMac and on Friday I installed Windows XP Professional on my main development machine. I’m awash in “modern” operating systems over here, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it all.
Actually, that’s not quite true. I am really impressed with Mac OS X, now that I’ve finally fought the good fight and gotten it reinstalled on my Indigo iMac. Talk about a truly wonderful desktop experience! It’s everything that Nautilus wished it could be, and lots more. It warms my penguin-loving heart to know that the core of OS X is running on BSD, and the GUI just blows me away.
I admit it, I’m a sucker for eyecandy, and OS X provides tons of it. The Dock (Apple’s version of the Taksbar in Windows) has got to be the best thing to happen since Mac invented the GUI way back whenever. I don’t know if I’ll ever get sick of the cool magnifcation effect of rolling over your various Dock-ed applications, or the funky “Genie” effect of minimizing windows. They literally “pour” down into the Dock, where you can then see a thumbnail screenshot of the page that you’re currently on. Even cooler than GNOME/KDE’s multiple desktops, IMO.
Of course, all this eyecandy comes at a price, as OS X seems to be pretty memory hoggy. It’s said that throwing as much RAM into your system as you can helps the situation quite a bit. My iMac is only a 500MHz G3, and the 320MB of RAM in the machine seems to be doing okay, although it’s certainly nothing special.
And as for XP? Well, time will tell, but so far it basically ‘feels’ like Windows 2000 Professional with a blue paint job and funny-looking icons. The file management system is no where near as useful, in my opinion, as OS X’s new multipane Finder interface, but you can setup Windows Explorer in XP to work basically the same as before (but where’s the fun in that?). I was just happy it updated from Windows 2000 so nicely–I was genuinely afraid I was about to hose all the data on my hard drive, but everything worked out just fine.
All in all, a very trippy week. There is an iMac in my workspace, XP on my desktop, and not a penguin to be found anywhere. To quote the intro movie to that Internet classic, ZeroWing:
CAPTAIN: “What happen?”
ENGINEER: “Somebody set up us the bomb!”