July 14, 2005
Where's the maximize button?
On Windows every window got the minimize, maximize, close button at its right top. Mac OS X got the same thing, except it is at the left top, and at the reverse order. Nope, it’s not that hard to use to that, since I couldn’t quite stand with the one button Touchpad, I’ve gone to buy a cute mini RF opticial mouse to use. And it isn’t that far to change your habit to move from the right top to the left top, after all it’s just a 12 inches TFT screen.
Yeah..12 inches TFT LCD screen. I’d bet you could imagine how competitive the screen space is. Good, so I should focus on one application window and stay along with my work. The dock should be auto-hide so then I could enjoy 15cm more height :)…but then! It just ain’t let go and let me maximize the window! Mac OS X window has the X - + little button, from left to right sticking at the left top corner. But the “+”, which I thought it would be the same maximize button as Windows is, it would just try to get the window bigger enough for users’ viewing pleasure. Well, that’s very considering… Imagine this, in a web browser I am using, on one URL you’ve surfed to, you click the “+” to make the window showing bigger to suit the content. Then after while, surfing to the other web page, the space ain’t enough, the horizontal scrollbar appear at the bottom, so you click the “+” again. And then you switch URL, and then you click “+” again, and again.…so and so, isn’t it annoying?!
Would it please have a pure maximize button?
Disclaimer: I haven’t google anything about it yet.
July 13, 2005
Like and Dislike of the iBook
Like
- Keyboard is awesome, key is big enough and just located at where it should be (well, suit my taste); comfortable on typing
- White looks great
- Battery life stay long, good. (note this is not only my first Mac machine, my first laptop too. Feel good about long battery life)
Dislike
- Touchpad has only ONE button (Nope, I don’t like the idea of Ctrl + tap for the right click)
- ONE delete button for Del and Backspace?? Well, I don’t know about this yet, not doing any searching for it.
- 12 inches is a bit eye hurting especially while you’re tired. But that’s not its fault. Hah.
July 11, 2005
First Impression
It is plain beautiful — that’s my first impression to my iBook. The colours looks fine and fonts is just right…Yeah, RIGHT! I used to have high request for the font in the computer I used, I like the good looking and smooth fonts. It’s just not feeling right when I see ugly font in my computer, kind of paranoid of it.
Do I ever use Mac? Well, back to 10 years ago I remembered that’s one night I have to go to computer lab to do some homework. There wasn’t any PC available then I felt lucky to find a Mac. Without other choice then so I sit down and open photoshop to have a try — double-click->crash, open->crash.….then I gave up and left. So that’s the first experience. After that I have never touch a Mac machine except standing inside some Apple store, holding a mouse, looking at the beautiful screen and clicking here-n-there for one or two minutes. That’s all.
Ever since I thought it’s cool to have an Apple laptop, I finally bought one 2 years later.
It’s a second hand iBook G4. It run Mac OS X Panther. I don’t get the original OS CD, I don’t get the bag, oops…I don’t even know the administrator password!! The first thing I want to do is try to bring the softwares up-to-date. But I don’t have the Admin’s password in order to install software.
Did some google give me these links:
It’s either one of these ways:
- If you are already logon as an admin, great, all you need to do is just type : sudo passwd root, then give the new password
- If you got the original Mac OS X CD, just boot it up with the CD, and choose reset password
- Follow the above link, it teach you to hold Command + S button on the OS rebooting, go into the plain old console mode, mounting file system and then: passwd root, give the new password, reboot. Done.
Well well well…good advice, when I saw all those links, I’ve been playing little smart to create a userid of my own and make it auto-login, then I ever rebooted it. Stupid me. So I don’t have a original OS CD, and…I have already login with the new account (no more the old and good admin — even though it isn’t my name). Okay I have the last choice, follow the instructions to boot up into console mode step by step, then “passwd root”. Nope, it didn’t work, it just quit and staring at me :(.
I have almost gave up after 30 minutes of trying, and then my UNIX mind ring a bell again :). I boot into the console mode, instead of changing the root’s password, I could change the sudoer!! So adding the new users into /etc/sudoer then reboot! Once rebooted my userid is some one who could su hahaha…that’s it, with “sudo passwd root” then I am done. Piece with the Mac OS X.
July 10, 2005
MT 3.17
Having stop blogging for more than one year, I never expected the upgrade of MovableType could be that easy. First I download the full package and uploaded, found it’s the wrong tar file later on and re-download the upgraded package —- upload again and re-configure MySQL option. That’s it, done! Everything just works!
Well, not everything in the actual fact, some old-dated plugins didn’t function anymore (like RelatedFromWaypath). Of course, I have been out of all these for a long time, so never did the follow and catch up. But I am truely happy the main and core function just works painlessly. Great work, MovableType.
Switch
Ever since Mac OS X launched, I’ve been thinking of owning a machine running it. I used to think that a combination of a decent GUI environment with UNIX back-end/kernel would be the perfect OS. And now, finally, Apple hardware seem more affordable nowadays — then I convinced myself to buy this little thing:
It’s a 12” 1.2Ghz Apple iBook G4, unfortunately what I bought is a 2nd hand iBook, it didn’t come with Mac OS X Tiger (10.4). From the web I could find it’s bought on April 21st and entitled to a Tiger up-to-date program, but too bad I couldn’t get seller’s original receipt on time, it was expired yesterday :(.
I didn’t really intend to switch. Having heard lots of good things about the Mac OS X, the state-of-art technology and good user interface, I want to learn about it. But I forsee for the difficulty to be used to it, after all I’ve been using PCs for more than 10 years. There’re lots of die-hard habits. What’s usability? It’s the less surprise for the users when he/she perform some action on the interface, we users should feel and get the response from the OS or application as what we expected.
That sounds true, so switching platform is not a easy and pleasant topic, I’d come to that later.