Getting My Mac On
I’m a recent switcher to Mac OS X. It’s been quite a controversy among some of my friends; I think they see Apple computers as pretentious – but I’ll ignore these luddites for now and maybe talk about that another time. I’ve bought a 2.4 GHz aluminium MacBook with 4 GB RAM. Technical details are important to me. I am a geek. I really love my laptop, so let’s start with talking about things I like.
Time Machine – this is an amazing feature – I think it is the best thing I’ve found so far in Mac OS X. You connect a large USB drive to the laptop and it backs up everything on the laptop to that drive. Then, once an hour it saves down anything that changes. Backups are notoriously tedious (literally nobody does backups, they’re for wankers) and this solves the problem in two ways:
- It’s automatic, you don’t have to do anything except plug the USB cable in when you put your laptop on the desk.
- Using Time Machine is actually fun! The interface has to be seen: it’s stupid. When you choose to go into the time machine view for the folder, you can look back through all the backups taken for that folder. You can literally travel through time and retrieve anything that was in the folder during any of your old backups. Just browsing through the time dimension is fun, and the graphics that Mac OS uses to do this are so over the top, that I sit there clicking on the arrows just to see the smooth animations.
Aside: In the interests of fair reporting I should say I spent a few hours wrestling with my laptop just after writing this – Finder started crashing whenever I opened Time Machine. It turned out to be some bug with the display port – more details here.