Life with Mac

As you probably read in my previous post, I just bought a new MacBook. I've been slowly getting used to its quirks, and to the Mac "way of thinking," for lack of a better term. I've learned a lot, and I thought it might be useful to share some of my experiences.

First, one of the most important discoveries I've made. Tonight I transferred my music collection on to the Mac. I've used iTunes before and I'm happy enough to just stay with that, but I was having issues at first. Most of my MP3 files were imported into the library just fine, but some failed to show up. I tried all sorts of things: the import tool, double clicking, clicking and dragging. Snow Leopard's built-in audio preview was able to play them, but iTunes refused to acknowledge the existence of these certain files. After looking around for a while, I learned that this might happen if the MP3 file's headers were a little corrupted; the files would play in most players, but not iTunes. I also found a tool to fix the offending files: MP3 Scan+Repair for OSX. The really good news was that it was dead simple to use: I just dragged my entire music folder into the app, hit scan, and it told me everything that wasn't quite right. Another few clicks, and all of the bad files were rebuilt and playing in iTunes! It's still a little annoying that iTunes is that picky about files, and doesn't warn you when it's ignoring files like that.

Besides that, I've found a decent set of applications for daily stuff. Many of the programs I'm used to, like FileZilla, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Office have Mac versions. For other things, I've found some nice replacements. The sales guy recommended Fraise (French for Strawberry) for editing code, and that's quite nice. The fact that the underlying kernel is BSD is great, because it acts a lot like Linux, which I'm very comfortable using. That provides a lot of under-the-hood power. There are even ports for Wine and Unison, so I can use some of my Windows-only programs and sync files with my server.

I've been playing around with dual-booting Ubuntu Linux as well. My first attempt was a total failure, which forced me to reinstall everything from scratch. However, after I found the rEFIt boot loader, I had better success. As it turns out, Ubuntu has pretty good support for running on Mac hardware. On the other hand, I probably won't use it all that much, as I haven't found many tasks that I can't accomplish with OSX. I have to say, I'm impressed.