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I switched. I promised myself I would do this before I left for the US on Tuesday. I spend the day today moving stuff and tweaking. The only thing I couldn't get right was the kanji (Japanese character) files in my contact list and my Japanese email moved over. It was much easier than I thought and having switched, I feel euphoric. I'm now listen to music on iTunes (which tell me that I have 3.5 days of music), am syncing my Treo with my contacts, creating a this blog entry with Kung-Log staring at my brand new Dell Latitude trying to figure out what I'm going to do with it. ;-) Windoze now feels so... crass. It reminds me of when I got my first Mac back in 1984 and switched away from my Apple II.
I was talking to Jun Murai the other day and he said that a lot of the IETF folks were switching as well. I think the Unix at the core really makes it easy to get the geeks over...
Anyway, as with blogging, I'm a bit late in figuring it out, but it doesn't look like I'm late for the party.
Now I have to seriously start bothering people to write stuff for and port stuff to the Mac.
You can use your Dell Lattitude to play with Linux.
Welcome back to Macintosh. :-)
When you are tired to read a long blog, please try this.
http://www.mercury-soft.com/abstracter.html
The one application I absolutely insist on, use even more than Google, and which you will discover you can't live without, is Copypaste a utility that remembers the last 100 things you cut or copied to your clipboard (recall that Ted Nelson calls the clipboard "the abominable hidey-hole?"), allows you to maintain any number of sets of up to ten clipboards per set -- trust me, you want this. Why it isn't part of OSX, I dunno.
Epiphany... ok. Maybe not. But liberation? Yeah. That's it. You are in for a real treat. I've got a new blog posting going up later today about a few hints/treasures I've discovered in Mac OSX. Though, there are tons of sites and blogs that do this, I just love the feeling of discovery when I learn something new by accident. Check it out later.
Look forward to the hints. There is so muc h stuff... I have to remember to focus on the cool new things rather than the things I can't do anymore. ;-)
Speaking of Google: the SearchGoogle service is a true gem - highlight text in any app and hit shift-command-g to search google for it. This is particularly handy with Google's smart handling of things like directions - I now generally highlight addresses and google them to get maps since Google does a better job than the crap maps many sites include.
Also handy is OmniDictionary - it checks the highlighted text against a number of online dictionaries, the CIA world factbook, etc.
Maybe you know this site already, but these are great source for finding interesting apps. ;-)
http://www.macosxapps.com/
http://www.macosxhints.com
Welcome (back) to the Mac!
The Mac is a treat to use as a foreigner in Japan, and I could not do without WordLookup (command+ , to do language dictionary lookups from any Services-enabled app) Thanks go out to Ringo, Tokyo MUG (ringo.net I believe) for the intro to this.
Also have you checked out recent Sherlock? Movie channel in Sherlock, translations for the Nihon-go challenged... Fantastic!
Dirk
Hey Dirk. Thanks for this. I finally got around to installing WordLookup. It's great. One question... how do you get it to show up in Services and bind to the command+, hotkey?