Ah, each day with the Mac gets a lot smoother. It was a rough transition, but I think I’m finally starting to settle down. (Lord, help me to not turn into a fanboy…help me remember how much it sucked trying to get accustomed to this thing) It’s been really nice having the support of a few thoughtful commenters along the way, and my friend Matt from work has definitely provided some useful and much-appreciated advice–albeit, still from a perspective that makes me think he’s wearing Apple-colored glasses.

The biggest difference I’ve noted is that using OS X makes the OS seem a whole lot more apparent to the user. With XP, it’s largely transparent. You do what you do in the apps, and ignore the surrounding framework. With OS X, you’re forced to immerse yourself in a slick, (at times cartoony) animated interface at every turn. Zipping back and forth between apps isn’t a sterile Alt-Tab anymore, it’s a F9-click transition that’s smoothly animated and somewhat addicting. After three days with this thing, I find myself reaching for the F9 key even on my PC–even though I personally feel that hitting Alt-Tab was way better.

You get accustomed to things though, and use your desktop a lot more, especially given the one-key access to all the stuff on your desktop. In XP, you have to hunt for that little “Show Desktop” icon. Vista did the right thing in including the desktop as a window in their little Flip-3D thing, and I’m sure if I ever go the Vista route, my desktop will take on an entirely new role. (My XP philosophy is that desktops are meant to be neat, clean, and sparse)

I’m still not that big a fan of the Finder, and my RAM situation has forced me to just give up on attempting to use Fireworks on my Mac, but that’s OK. I’ve still got a PC on the KVM switch that needs to be there for some pretty expensive analytics software, so I can co-exist. I just hate switching back and forth though, and I must admit that I’m liking switching “back” to OS X more and more each time.

I must say, though, that while I’ll probably end up loving this OS, I don’t ever want to forget what the transition was like. I don’t want to turn into some zombie that walks around making people feel inferior for using a Microsoft operating system. I’d hate to have to teach my mom to use a Mac, and I can’t imagine the nightmares that would happen if work tried moving everyone to a Mac. If it took some people a month to figure out how to print, what would it be like trying to teach them different habits?

Score:
PC: 3
Mac: 1