Mac at Work: Day One

It's the first day with my new MacBook, which is replacing the old ThinkPad I've been using. So far it feels sort of like the first time I opened Photoshop: I know the basic functions it'll do, I know what I want to do, but I'm not quite sure how to get there or what all the advanced options are. As with my early Photoshop days, I click around a lot to see what happens.

Positives: Connecting to my home wireless network and Web surfing was a snap. The hardware has a clear attention to design details, offering happy surprises like a magnetic socket for the power cord. The OS X eye candy also seems well designed, offering not just gratuitous razzle-dazzle but helpful visual cues. And, downloading and installing Firefox was more elegant than in Windows (once my colleague Ken Mingis explained how it worked; but one of the things I detest about Windows is the install/uninstall process, and the .dll and other files that seem to get littered about your system if you try or change software applications a fair amount.)

But sometimes I feel like one of those newbies taking a "learn how to use a computer" class at the local library. How do you download and install a file from the Internet? Where's my application folder? After years of customizing my OS, doing command-line scripting and coding in multiple languages, feeling so clueless at a keyboard is somewhat unpleasant.

"For the first few days or weeks, you may instinctively reach for certain familiar features that simply aren't where you expect to find them, the way your tongue keeps sticking itself into the socket of the newly etracted tooth," warns David Pogue in Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition.Yes. Oh yes.

I've got most of the basic work functionality on the machine already: Browser, e-mail (the Lotus Notes install took IT support awhile, but it works), VPN, access to our content management system. But I still have a lot of other things I've yet to set up. Some of this is what happens whenever I move to a new system, because it takes weeks to get all my extras set up the way I like it. I'll see how much, if any, I'm missing because of the OS switch.