First, a disclaimer: I’m not a complete computer newbie. My first computer was an IBM AT and then an IBM XT. I started off with DOS 3 and moved on to Windows 3.1. I’ve run every version of Windows since, including the terror that was Windows ME. I’ve also installed numerous versions of linux since the kernel was at version 2.2. All of that is just a long way of saying that I lost my fear of computers a long time ago. It doesn’t bother me too much if I break something.

Back to my experience with OS X. First off, if you’ve ever used Windows, you’ll be used to the method of navigation. Point and click is the order of the day. There are some differences though. The close, minimize and maximize buttons are located in the top right of the active window instead of top left. For the first hour or so, I found myself automatically moving the pointer to the left when I wanted to close a window, though once I got used to it, it wasn’t such a big deal.

When using OS X for the first time, you’ll noticed that the trackpad has just one button. This button performs left clicks only. So how do you right click to bring up the context sensitive menus? It didn’t take too long to find the trackpad properties in the System Preferences section. This utility has options for enabling right clicking by tapping the touchpad with two fingers. You can also enable scrolling by dragging the tips of your two fingers up or across the pad.

The biggest problem I’ve had to date is the keyboard, or more precisely, keyboard shortcuts. I much prefer using the keyboard to the mouse, and in Windows, I can pretty much do everything with the keyboard. I’m sure that with a bit of work, I’ll gain the same level of profeciency, but after so many years using Windows, it’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. For example, in Windows you can use CTRL-LEFT/ RIGHT to highlight a sequence of words in a piece of text. On a Mac, the key combination is ALT-LEFT/ RIGHT. So even after a couple of hours of typing, I’m still using the Windows way of highlighting text.

While Windows uses the Taskbar to show a list of open applications, OS X provides the Dock, which in the Windows world is combination Start Menu and Taskbar. While the Windows Taskbar will show one button for each open window, or group of windows, the dock doesn’t. If multiple windows are open, clicking the appropriate Dock icon will bring all of them to the front of the screen. As far as I can see there is no way to easily pick just one of available open windows.

Installing applications took a bit longer to figure out, but once I had the hang of it, it turned out to be a breeze. The idiots guide is simple, download the application, usually in the .dmg format. Double-click the file and the OS automatically mounts it as a drive, and then opens the OS X Installer. Then one of two things will happen: you’ll either be presented with the contents of the “virtual” drive, in which case the application needs to be dragged to your Applications folder; or you’ll be presented with a very familiar installation routine, click Continue a couple of times and you’re ready to go.

One of the pleasant surprises was to find that Mac OS X comes with a full installation of Apache Web Server. One of the reasons that I bought this machine was to do web development work on, and having Apache already installed, certainly cuts down on the work I have to do to get it ready. It’s a simple matter of going to System Preferences, Sharing and turning on Personal Web Sharing. Your personal website is stored in /Users/[username]/Sites. One word of warning though, when initially setting up your user account you are prompted to encrypt your home directory with FileVault. If you do so, Apache will display an error message if you try to access your personal site. In this case, there is a “main site” that you can use instead.

So far thats the software side of things, as seen my an OS X newbie. On the hardware side of things, there are a couple of issues that I’ve found. First off, the screen is very bright. Web pages with a lot of white space seem to generate a lot of glare. I’ve found myself adjusting the brightness quiet a lot. I haven’t found anyway to change the contrast, so I’ll just have to keep experimenting until I find a setting that’s comfortable.

Another thing that you need to know is that these systems get hot. Very hot. And that’s because of the Intel Core 2 Duo processor. So be careful when you have it on your lap.

I got the immaculate white MacBook, but I have no idea how long it’s going to stay like that. It just seems to attract dirt. As it’s a brand new machine, I’m paranoid about every speck of dirt that I see on it, and I get the feeling I’ll have to put in a lot of effort to keep it that way.

Day one down, and I’ve learned a bit, but I think with a bit of work, I could get used to OS X.