First Impressions

For those of you who are curious, here is what I ordered. It's a very basic setup.

13" White MacBook with nVidia 9400m chipset
2.0GHz Core2Duo
2GB RAM
250GB HDD (upgrade)
iWork '09 (option)
mini-DVI to DVI adapter (option)
Apple Remote (option)

So with the Unboxing Fetish portion of the program out of the way, I opened the lid and pressed the power button. After answering a few configuration questions (primarily for language settings), I was greeting by the MacBook with "Welcome" in more languages than I can remember. During the account setup, I was surprised to see myself on the screen, when I remembered the iSight camera. It was then that I realized that I really needed to brush my hair. After a quick brush, I had my account set up, and my MacBook was configured and on my wireless network. It really was as simple and painless as that. I even had access to my Windows shares when I looked in Finder.

I then connected my digital camera (Canon PowerShot G6) with a USB cable, and iPhoto came up shortly thereafter and asked how I'd like to handle importing my pictures. No additional drivers or software was necessary. Next, I tried importing some pictures from my Windows share, and within minutes, I had pictures of my son in iPhoto. The face recognition feature was almost criminally easy to use and just as effective in detecting faces in the pictures. I can't wait to import more of my pictures and really test this application.

Moving on, I opened a video file, but Quicktime didn't have the appropriate codec to play it. A quick Google search directed me to Perian (www.perian.org), which is similar to the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP) for Windows. With Perian installed, Quicktime was now able to play my video file. Now here's another key difference between the Mac and Windows: I was actually able to playback the video in reverse. None of the media players that I use in Windows allow for reverse playback. Either they simply can't, or I haven't figured it out. At any rate, this is a nice capability to have, seeing as how a lot of videos that I watch are subtitled, and sometimes a subtitle flashes by a little quickly for me to read. It will be nice to punch that rewind button instead of having to reach for the mouse to reset the progress indicator. In one of my multimedia apps, you can't even skip using the progress indicator, so if you miss something or worse, accidentally hit the Stop button, you're screwed.

The only negative really isn't a negative, and that's the controls. It's simply going to take time to re-train my fingers to use the Mac keyboard and the trackpad. Some of the immediate editing keystroke differences that I've come across are:
- delete instead of Backspace - delete
- fn+delete instead of Delete - forward delete
- command+X/C/V instead of Ctrl+X/C/V - cut/copy/paste
- control+Up/Down instead of PgUp/PgDn - Page Up/Down
- command+Up/Down instead of Ctrl+Home/End - Beginning/End of Document
- option+Left/Right instead of Ctrl+Left/Right - skip previous/next word

Overall, it has been a very positive out-of-the-box experience.