Twitter
EmailUsing your Mac
Dec 29
In the grand scheme of things, I’m a Mac newbie. I’ve used my Power Mac exclusively as my home computer for just two years and three months. I love it dearly, and I particularly enjoy the OS upgrade from about a year and a half ago. With the next OS upgrade on the horizon, I see lots of people talking about what they want to see or not want to see or what they like and dislike.
Reading all this, it occurred to me: I’m not a Mac power user. Heck, I’m a freak. I was listening to Mac Break Weekly, in which the entire panel of experts discussed how useless the Dock was and how stupid Spotlight is. They were asking for ways to remove the Dock entirely! I don’t get it. I have a core group of applications I use most often that I have a click away on the Dock. That’s a wonderful thing to me. I don’t need to clear all available windows to find an icon on the desktop. I don’t need to click on the START button and then the PROGRAMS button and then another button or two to get to my Most Favored Applications. I just have a link to it on the side of my screen, always visible. (Yes, I moved my Dock to the far left.)
How do these people launch their applications? Are they all just Quicksilver dependent?
The other thing I heard complaints about was the Spotlight feature. I can sort of understand some of the frustrations with it. But it works wonders on my machine. I don’t want to search a network with it. I usually know what I’m looking for on it, so I know what search terms to use. It’s just easier to type in the beginnings of a document name instead of launching Finder and digging through folders to get to the document. And, sometimes, I do searches of my hard drive for documents I don’t remember the names of, and I find them, pretty quickly. Boolean search would be wonderful, yes, but I don’t see a big problem otherwise.
Am I just that big a Mac loser?
Dec 29, 2006 @ 11:13:36
Yeah, they’re insane. I love my dock. I also use a heavily customized Fruit Menu (http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/fruitmenu), and I use spotlight to launch documents and stuff, but my dock is pretty heavily populated.
Dec 29, 2006 @ 11:40:31
Dude, Dashboard pwns the Desktop and Start button. I love having those apps so easily available for launching and for switching windows. Love it.
Dec 29, 2006 @ 20:36:35
I’ve stopped using the Dock and have been using an App called XMenu. Basically it’s a pulldown menu similar an OS 9 throwback that has short cuts to Apps I normally use. I’ve stopped using the Dock completely.
Dec 30, 2006 @ 01:41:33
Computer users anywhere (Mac, Linux and Windows) are a bunch of whiners ;)
Dec 30, 2006 @ 18:54:59
Funny you’re only a power user if you make OSX run as Linux or OS 9. I, like Aug, enjoy the dock and spotlight. Although I do use Quicksilver for running apps not on my dock.
Dec 31, 2006 @ 03:24:11
The Day I went Mac was the day I wrote off the PC. Yeah, the desktop is still a PC but hopefully it won’t be when April rolls around. I love my Power Book. I even got my mom to jump the Mac bandwagon. I just have to get Dad to come around and it will be a Mac house. That’s all I yearn for. The only PC I use is the one at my job. :(