First Look: Macbook Pro, Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Mac­Book Pro 13 inch Early 2011

I got a Mac­Book Pro 13 (early 2011) about a month ago and I thought I should share my early impres­sions on both the Mac­Book and OS X Snow Leop­ard. Now I do real­ize that Snow Leop­ard is going to be refreshed this month — in about a week or so, accord­ing to rumours — so my expe­ri­ence with Snow Leop­ard will soon be for­got­ten but still rel­e­vant. I will also talk about OS X Lion when it comes around — I’m eli­gi­ble for a free upgrade to Lion since I bought the mac recently. The key specs are:

Intel Core i7 2.7GHz dual core, 4GB DDR3 RAM and 500GB Hard drive. It also has a Thun­der­bolt port but I haven’t found any use for it. Mac OS ver­sion 10.6.8 (cur­rent lat­est and prob­a­bly last point update for Snow Leopard)

“Miss­ing” Programs/Features

Com­ing from Win­dows, there are some pro­grams that I assumed were bun­dled in with every oper­at­ing sys­tem. For the most part, they are present in Snow Leop­ard but there are some that I miss.

Paint

I never thought I cared much for Paint until I real­ized it was miss­ing in OS X. It’s a sim­ple graph­ics tool that you can use to draw stuff, shapes, lines and what have you. Noth­ing like it is bun­dled with Mac OS X. Lucky enough, some­one made a clone called Paint­brush. It works like a charm with all the key fea­tures that make Paint such a gem.

Aero Snap

One of the fea­tures I’d grown to love on Win­dows 7 is the Snap fea­ture. This resizes open win­dows to occupy half or the entire screen when you drag them to the edges or the top of the screen respec­tively. It’s a very pow­er­ful fea­ture for pro­duc­tiv­ity — so much so that even Ubuntu now has it. Not there in Mac OS X. In fact, win­dow man­age­ment in OS X is pretty bad. Win­dows don’t always max­imise to occupy the whole screen; you can only resize win­dows by drag­ging the right bot­tom cor­ner and no where else.
There are solu­tions though, this time not free. I use Bet­ter­Snap Tool which goes fur­ther than Snap to allow resiz­ing of win­dows to a quar­ter of the screen as well. I also use Moom which has more advanced win­dow man­age­ment to allow cus­tomiza­tions like resiz­ing win­dows to 3/4 of the screen using key­board short­cuts. It’s overkill — which is why I love it!

Unin­stalling apps

Installing pro­grams on the Mac is quite dif­fer­ent from Win­dows or Ubuntu. It’s very sim­ple — drag the appli­ca­tion into the appli­ca­tions folder. Some pro­grams do have “Windows-like” installers though and oth­ers require instal­la­tion via the Ter­mi­nal. That’s all well and good. Maybe I’m being a lit­tle picky here but… The prob­lem comes with remov­ing apps. On win­dows we have unin­stallers that take care of every­thing most of the times. On OS X you have to nav­i­gate to the appli­ca­tions folder and delete the app/drag it into the trash. Worse still, parts of the apps still remain in mys­te­ri­ous places.
Once again there’s a truck­load of apps to solve that issue — sim­ply drag the app to be deleted into an app like App­Cleaner, and it will find the all garbage files asso­ci­ated with the pro­gram for you.

The good stuff

I’ve focussed mainly on the bad so far. Now for the good stuff. You’ll notice I haven’t said any­thing about the Mac­Book itself — that’s because it’s left me speech­less. It is beau­ti­fully made; from the uni-body con­struc­tion, to the back­lit key­board, to the giant glass touch­pad — it’s all well thought out and sim­ply awe­some. The only thing is that it’s heav­ier than I thought but that’s ok… I could do with a bit of a work­out.
The Mac more than makes up for the few things it doesn’t have with a boat­load of features.

Automa­tor

Automa­tor is an app for build­ing apps in a way. You can design a work­flow or a series of tasks that you want the com­puter to do for you. These can be repet­i­tive tasks like resiz­ing a batch of images based on some cri­te­ria or extract­ing data from a web­site or any­thing really. I haven’t fully tapped into it but I can tell it is extremely powerful.

Spot­light

Spot­light is like the text search in the Win­dows start menu, only way more pow­er­ful. It indexes all the files on you com­puter so they are only a few key­board strokes away. With spot­light you can quickly search for and open files, appli­ca­tions, word def­i­n­i­tions and even per­form cal­cu­la­tions. There are more pow­er­ful options on Mac through, like Alfred, Quick­sil­ver and oth­ers which can allow you to go to web­sites and even search web­sites or play songs in iTunes, write a note, cre­ate a cal­en­dar event or send an email — all from a lit­tle one line text box. Yeah.

Mac App­Store

I’m a huge fan of apps. I like try­ing them out, dis­cov­er­ing new things and doing the things that I’ve always been doing eas­ier, smarter and eas­ier. I like easy. The Mac App­Store is sim­ple and ele­gant and it has a whole bunch of apps. I find that Macu­padte still has more apps than you can poke a stick at though. Macup­date has every­thing, the old and the new — stuff that hasn’t been released (betas), stuff that has been rejected etc.

Con­clu­sions

The Mac is awe­some and OS X Snow Leop­ard is awe­some too. I will be upgrad­ing to Lion when it offi­cially comes out. I didn’t get any of the devel­oper pre­views because I wanted to expe­ri­ence Leop­ard first as much as pos­si­ble to see where it’s all com­ing from. Hope­fully my expe­ri­ence will be help­ful to any­one new to a OS X or just plain inter­ested. I will con­tinue to post more OS X stuff and a top apps list or some­thing together with the usual(or not so usual :-p) news and happenings.