Okay, so the iMac arrived Monday, and here it is Thursday and I finally got it moved to my desk … I also cleared a ton of stuff off of my desk including 3 computers that were stacked on one corner … That’s where the iMac is now, but more toward the front … In using the iMac for a short time I have realized that there are some key differences … Like “Home” and “End” don’t function the way that they do on the PC … Also Control-Arrows don’t work the same either … I would use the Control-Arrows to quickly go through words while editing … but Alt-Arrow serves this purpose now .. The Control-Arrow goes to the beginning or the end of the current line … That was one of the first things I noticed …
The iMac came when in the middle of working on the Out On the Town so again, I didn’t have a chance to dive into it … What I did do however was to set the machine up and turn it on … When I turned it on it played a nifty little tune and presented me with the setup screen … I think at that point I realized that the machine had OS X Panther on it … Kind of a hassle since I had purchased Panther from another seller on eBay because this iMac was only supposedly coming with Jaguar (OSX 10.2) … This iMac also has an AirPort card installed, and I don’t have a wireless network, so I will be removing the card and selling that on eBay … It appears they normally go for about $75 … Anyway, so I went through that process, the machine was booted … Now what?
After a while of clicking around and exploring stuff, it became pretty obvious that there was nothing to look at on an empty system … There weren’t any more songs or anything … So, hmmm … Let’s pop a DVD in there and make sure this thing plays DVDs … There’s no button on the front to open the tray, so I looked around the System Properties thingimajig and couldn’t find anything … Then through loading some other programs I loaded what I think was the DVD Player … Ah! An EJECT icon … I clicked on that … Nothing … After trying that many times, I figured that even though I clicked it 9 times, the tenth time of clicking the mouse harder didn’t make this iMac understand that I meant business, so off to the web I went …
Eventually through some surfing and what not, I found that there is this key on the keyboard that opens the drive tray … *sigh* … What was the first movie played on my iMac? The Blues Brothers starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi … I didn’t play the whole movie, just enough to get to the opening song so I could hear the music through the iMac as well … The shape of the iMac’s 17″ screen works out well for the letterbox movie … Full screen, I thought it was very impressive … My own personal movie theater! So next was to pop in an audio CD … The Police Outlandos d’Amour … Roxanne … I “imported” Roxanne and I found that it created a Mac specific file … After doing some reading while on the laptop from work and stuff, I think I can change the import properties so that I will get MP3s instead … It went pretty quick …
So, two things right off the bat … I didn’t need extra software to play DVDs and I didn’t need extra software to RIP a CD track … Both of these activities I had to pay for on the Windows side …
I have downloaded and installed some stuff from the ‘net … Windows Media Player (for displaying web content in wmv format) and an IRC client (Snak) … A couple other things, and I did download Eudora, but I didn’t install it .. I want to see what’s up with iMac’s Mail program before I run Eudora on the Mac … I really wish Trillian were available for the Mac …
Anyway, it appears I have typed much, so I will stop this entry here … but more in the coming days as this experience unfolds …