Almost a week ago (yes, I have being meaning to write something down about this and have kept failing to do so) my iMac told me that there was a new version of the OS waiting for me. While this is doubtless no big deal for most Mac owners, this was interesting to me because it's the first time I've experienced an OSX upgrade since I got the iMac.

The download took a while and, while the install had a couple of curious bumps along the way, nothing seemed to actually go wrong.

The two main things I noticed were that it seemed to take the installer an absolute age to close down all running apps before it got to doing the installation. The other was that Mac progress bars seem to have a very odd way of calculating things. Often it would tell me that there was (for example) 28 minutes to go, it'd stay like that for 20 minutes, then drop 5 minutes, then appear to finish very soon after.

Mostly though I just left it alone and let it do its own thing. While the whole process took quite a while, it came back just fine (if I'm fair I'm not sure it took much more time than when I upgraded my laptop from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10).

The changes and improvements aren't really that obvious. I think I would say that the machine feels a little quicker in places, but nothing I can really put my finger on. One of the things I do like is the new split-screen facility for full-screen apps. While I don't use the full-screen facility that much I have found the need to split the screen before.

Some of the other improvements I've read about seem to involve things I'm never going to use: either improvements to Safari (Chrome all the way for me), the Mac Mail app (Gmail all the way for me, with Kiwi for Gmail being my client of choice on the iMac) or various iOS-oriented things which are of little use (while I do own an iOS device it's not one I use much).

Overall the thing I'm taking away from this is that the upgrade was smooth, nothing was obviously broken or changed in a way that was confusing (unlike some Windows or ChromeOS updates I've experienced in the past) and I didn't have to do anything that required much in the way of knowledge to keep it all going.

Doubtless that won't always be the case, such is the nature of OS upgrades.

While on the phone earlier I was doing that thing you often do when chatting with someone where you don't have to concentrate on something in front of you: I was randomly clicking around stuff on a machine. In this case I was faffing around on my iMac.

One of the places I landed was in the About dialog, looking at the support details:

Out if idle curiosity I clicked the "OS X Support" link, which opened my browser and took me to Apple's website. Only.... it didn't take me to a part of the site that was that useful to me:

Yes, for reasons best known to Apple or my iMac, I apparently need my help to be in Spanish. O_o

I could understand this if I had my system set to Spanish, which I don't:

About the only "non-standard" thing I have in my setup is the date, which I've set to ISO 8601 style rather than the usual UK style. I even experimented with changing that to the default on the remote chance that it was tickling some sort of odd bug in OS X.

So, yes, another wonderful example of Apple stuff "just working" and being good for mortals. Well, for interesting values of "working" anyway.

I seem to have somehow messed up my left hand. I'm not sure what the problem is yet, I'm speaking to the doctor and have had an x-ray to check out one possible cause, but the simple fact is that my left hand has an issue. Sometimes the arm is painful, pretty much all the time a couple of fingers are near-numb. One unfortunate side-effect of this is that I'm finding typing rather uncomfortable. Except, that is, when I'm typing in my iMac.

Given that the vast majority of the typing I do is on my Windows 7 desktop machine I decided it was time to look at getting a new keyboard, one that was as comfortable to type on as the Apple keyboard. Given that I really needed to be in a position where I could actually try the keyboards out I headed off to the local PC World.

Long story short: none of the Windows-oriented keyboards I tried did it for me. None were as comfortable as the Mac keyboard. I tried a few a couple of times and then suddenly had an idea... Apple do a full-size keyboard and, from what I've seen in the past, it does work with Windows, after a fashion. So I went to talk to the Apple guy, checked they had one in stock, handed over £40 and headed home again.

Having now worked with it for a couple of days I think this might be one of the best keyboard purchases I've ever made.

It's not ideal, of course. The keyboard isn't designed to work with Windows, it's designed for the Mac. But for the most part I'm finding that it's not confusing and I'm adapting just fine.

I had to go searching for an unofficial layout that I could install (one that's actually old enough that it doesn't even say it supports Windows 7) and installing that seems to have cured a few issues. The issues I do have remaining are:

• Depending on the application I'm in, @ and " are swapped. Really, I'm not kidding. In SublimeText @ and " are the right way round; in Skype they're the wrong way round. I suspect that this might be down to the fact that I need to restart applications so they take up the new mapping (a reboot of the machine might be in order here).
• The keyboard has no marked insert toggle key. There is one, it's the 0 on the numeric keyboard if you have (also missing, but with a mapping) numlock turned off.
• Alt and Win are the wrong way round. The Cmd key acts as the Win key and it is in the same position as Alt is normally in. I'm actually adapting to this pretty quickly.
• Apple hates the # key. Much like I have problems typing # on the iMac, the same issue exists when typing on Windows too. Whereas on the iMac I have to use Alt-3 to get a #, on the Windows machine I have to use Ctrl-Alt-3. Not ideal but it works.

They're the main issues I've discovered so far. It's possible that there are other niggles waiting for me but, hopefully, there's workarounds for them too. Mostly though I'm finding that the small adjustments I have to make to how I work are worth it given just how comfortable this keyboard is to type on.

I really do wish there was a Windows-oriented keyboard that had the exact same build quality.

Last night, before heading for bed, I noticed that there was an update available for OS X on the iMac, and also for iTunes. Despite the late hour I decided to do the update anyway. OS X updated pretty smoothly (albeit with some rather unhelpful progress bars that appear to give estimated times that have no relation to reality), as did iTunes.

I was then told that there was an update for my iPod as well (all part of this new thing where Apple have invented Spotify, obviously). I let that start doing its thing and that's where things got odd. First it started the update and the iPod appeared to insist that it wasn't plugged into the iMac, even though it was. Then I gave it a second go (after unplugging it and plugging it in again) and it all seemed to go through just fine, only...

...while the iPod was pretty sure it was now running iOS 8.4, iTunes on the iMac had other ideas:

The following morning iTunes kept insisting that it needed to do the update so, even though the iPod was obviously up to date, I let it do it anyway. After it'd gone through the update process again it still insisted that the iPod was running 8.3 rather than 8.4. Until, that is, I unplgged it and plugged it back in again.

So now it all seems fine. I just had to do a variation on "have you tried turning it off and on again?"

Once again I find myself running into things on a Mac that are very common elsewhere, on other operating systems, and which Mac owners would often have you believe weren't an issue.

My history with computers starts with a Sinclair ZX81 in the early 1980s, followed shortly by a Vic20, then on to the BBC B and fairly quickly on to very early IBM PC compatible machines. In the early 1990s I added OS/2 (during the introduction of Warp) and not too long after that GNU/Linux. Along the way I've also used the odd Unix here and there as well as CP/M, RSTS and VMS.

Aside from an inherited Mac whose model name escapes me, and whose operating system version also escapes me, I've never really had too much exposure to the world of Apple.

A couple of weeks back all of that changed.

It's quite a long time since I had a Unix of some form as a desktop machine and I was starting to get the urge to have one again. During all of this time I've had a GNU/Linux box or two available but for the past few years I've always used them from the (dis)comfort of my Windows desktop. Generally that was fine because the uses I had were not desktop.

Anyway, long story short: I started out thinking that I wanted some form of Unix on my desk again and, somehow, ended up walking out of a shop with an iMac.

Given the above history I thought it might be fun to jot down my experiences in the first couple of weeks. This will be a vaguely random wander through my experiences. It's not a review. It's not even really intended as a judgement of the machine and the operating system. It's nothing more than a collection of notes of what I found and my reaction to what I found.

The keyboard

The first strong reaction I had to the machine was regarding the keyboard. I thought I was going to hate it. I've had the misfortune of using various chiclet keyboards over the years and I've hated every single one. I find that I can't type on them, that it doesn't feel right, and that it makes my fingers ache badly if I spend too much time using them. My history and experiences has always been such that I've generally preferred very mechanical-feeling keyboards.

This just wasn't the case with the iMac keyboard. I don't know why, I still don't know why, but this feels like one of the most comfortable keyboards I've ever typed on. Despite the keys being chiclet style they move in a very positive way that really surprised me. It doesn't hurt to type, at all, and I'm finding I can type faster on this keyboard than any other I've typed on before.

There is a flipside though. I find the whole design far too cramped. Even now, a couple of weeks later, as I type this on it, I wish the keys were just a little bigger and just a little more spaced out. I'm adjusting, of course -- much of this is about muscle memory -- but it does mean that it's in a constant fight with my "knowledge" of my other main keyboards.

And then there's the keys that it lacks.

I'm still finding that this is a terrible keyboard for a programmer. For one thing, here on the UK version of the keyboard, there's no # key. At least, there's no simple, comfortable, direct access to the # key. Any time I want to type a # I have to shift my left hand to find the (I think it's called the) option key and hit 3. Shift 3 is £. And it gets even worse. This setup doesn't work at all in GNU emacs so I then have to put the keyboard in Australian mode so I can use shift-3 to get a #.

Why there isn't a proper # key is beyond me.

And then there's the (on the version that came with this iMac) complete lack of page keys as well as home and end. Overall this makes the whole keyboard feel very unfriendly to programmers and also to writers in general.

This, of course, is my bias and muscle memory from PCs showing. I'm still not convinced that that bias and muscle memory is wrong.

The mouse

When I first started with it I hated the mouse. I should be fair and point out that, overall, I hate mice anyway. For a good 20 years I've thrown away every mouse I've ever had turn up with a machine and have made use of a trackball instead. I find that a trackball gives me far more control and is far more comfortable. So, initially, I put the Apple mouse to one side and plugged in a trackball instead.

For reasons I forget now I found myself needed to use the Apple mouse again. Once I did that I decided to "force" myself to give it a fair shot and, now, I'm glad I did. Much like with the keyboard, despite me having a bias against what it is, this has turned out to be one of the most comfortable mice I've ever used. It sits right in the hand, the lack of actual buttons means I don't have to shape my hand to fit the design but, instead, the design allows for how my hand rests. I also rather like the gestures too.

This is the first mouse that has stayed on my desktop. I'm surprised.

By the way, whoever thought that the "natural" scroll option, which is on by default, was "natural", is barking mad.

The GUI

One of the main intended uses for this machine is the Unix shell, working inside the terminal. Given that the actual UI of the OS doesn't matter so much to me. That said, I'm finding it pretty pleasant. I find it a lot tidier-looking than Windows, although I also find it more frustrating in some places.

One good example is in the Finder, when I have a folder open. I find that it's quite common for me, on Windows, when I have an Explorer window open, to want to copy the path of the folder for use elsewhere. That's very easy to do because the path is in an edit field at the top of the window and can be edited and copied. If there's a way to do this with the OS X Finder I've yet to figure that one one.

Another thing I'm still not getting used to, and I'm still very unconvinced by, as a design decision, is the business of having an application's menus always appear at the top of the screen disconnected from the application windows themselves. I appreciate that this is a very Apple/Mac way of doing things but I really can't get used to the idea -- especially given that it gives the (incorrect) impression that the whole GUI is really single tasking.

On the whole though most of this doesn't matter too much to me. Large parts of what I'm doing is in the terminal window, with other parts of it being in my editors of choice (either SublimeText or GNU emacs, depending on what I'm doing) or inside Google Chrome. In other words the general experience is one that carries over most of the main operating systems I've used on desktop machines.

Installing software

For an operating system that prides itself on being simple to use and easy to understand, and especially one whose bigger fans sell as being simple to use and easy to understand (especially in relation to Windows), the whole business of installing software seems very confusing and very scrappy.

So far I've found a few different ways of installing software and none of it makes a whole lot of sense to me without going and searching about it and reading up on it. Sometimes I download an app and all I need to do is drag it into the Applications folder. Other times I get a zip which I have to open and then... it can go a couple of different ways. Sometimes I get a 'dmg' and when I open that up I get a window where I have to drag one icon onto another icon in that window to do the install. Sometimes I get something like the last one I mention but instead I have to double-click on an icon that's in the window.

There might even be other options I've had to follow. I forget now.

And then there's the business of removing software! That seems to be complete chaos. In some cases you delete the app and it's all good. In other cases you need to do that and hunt down some other bits and remove them too. In other cases it seems like the author has supplied their own uninstaller.

We've been here before. I know this setup rather well. This is exactly the sort of world we lived in back when Windows 3.1 was a new thing. This came as and still is a massive surprise to me: OS X is as sophisticated as a fancy shell that ran on top of MS DOS when it comes to software management.

Doing the right thing, except when not

While I'm on the subject of the famous great design of the Mac... what's up with the business of seeing the time format? The system preferences seem very flexible when it comes to setting date and time formats. I really like the dialog that provides this:

As you might see above, my preference when it comes to date formats is to have everything in ISO 8601 format. Having set that I then noticed that the time shown in the menu bar on the desktop was.... whatever the hell Apple appear to have decided for me!

Even Windows lets me set the date format as I want it in the desktop time display. Apple, meanwhile, seem to provide a great method of letting you set your date and time formats "just so" and then they seem to just go right ahead and ignore your preference in the one place you'll see it the most.

If you have a Mac, you have software I wrote on it (I think)

From what I could tell every Mac has a copy of GNU emacs installed, out of the box. That actually kind of impressed me. Sure, it's a rather out of date version of GNU emacs, but it's a copy of GNU emacs and that's all that matters.

That fact actually means something rather interesting, to me. See, there's two small packages that are part of GNU emacs that I originally wrote. One is called 5x5, the other quickurl.

So, yeah, from what I can see, on every new Mac you'll find two bodies of code that I originally wrote, pre-installed.

Yeah, I know, shitty claim to fame. I'll take it anyway. ;)

Overall initial impression

Overall my initial impression is a good one. The Apple iMac seems to make for a pretty good Unix workstation. The keyboard layout could do with some work to make it more friendly to programmers (well, to this programmer) but overall it all makes sense and is easy to navigate.

If most of what you do is actually online then I'd say that an iMac would be a huge waste of money. If you want a desktop machine for web browsing and generally working "in the cloud" then you'd do a lot better to buy a Chromebase (or, of course, a Chromebook if you're looking at Macbooks). On top of this, if most of what you're doing is online but you want to do some client-side stuff such as image/video editing and gaming then I struggle to see how an iMac would be a good choice too. For the money it's hilariously underpowered when compared to a reasonably equivalent Windows PC (or, of course, GNU/Linux machine if what you want to do can be done there).

My own reasons for purchase were about having a desktop Unix workstation that I could install various compilers on so I could muck about and work on some fun projects I want to get done. It was an unusual extravagance that I don't regret and, so far, I've been pleased with.

There's very few people I'd actually recommend one to though as it seems pretty clear to me that, generally, their money could buy them so much more.

But it's a nice new shiny toy. ;)

I'm on a bit of a "explore other universes" trip at the moment, it would seem. The other weekend I finally cracked and purchased my first ever OS X device and, earlier today, I purchased my first ever iOS device.

Don't worry, I'm not abandoning the world of Android; far from it if my experiences of iOS so far are anything to go by. However, having started slowly working through a book that teaches Cocoa and Swift I thought it might be interesting to be in a position, at some point in the future, to be able to make and throw an app at an iOS device and it seemed the most affordable way of doing that was to grab an iPod.

So I did.

One of the first things I did, and I'm glad to find it was possible, was to load it up with apps that make it into a reasonable Google device (so, so far, I've got Gmail, Google+, Google Calendar and Google Music on there -- need to sort Google Drive too, at least). Next up was to get some music on it too -- might as well actually use it to listen to music, I guess.

That actually turned out to be more fun than I was expecting. See, I gave up on iTunes many years ago, back when it was pretty much the only legit method of buying music online. Since then I've tended to work with ripped copies of my CD collection or I've listened to music I've bought on Google Play (the latter bulked out with the former thanks to Google's music uploader).

And here's the fun part: if you use the recent Google Music Chrome app (which, it seems, allows unlimited downloads of your albums) to pull the music down, and drop them into iTune's import folder, magic happens and iTunes gets nearly populated with music. Even better, music that I'd originally ripped as WMAs comes back own as mp3s, so solving the problem of iTunes not doing WMAs.

Handy!

So, anyway, that's the iPod set up as a generally useful device.

As for iOS itself.... Ugh. I'm far from impressed. Compared to Android it feels old and clunky and very constraining. For example, I can't really control what's on the home page. Sure, I can move things about, and I can even remove apps I've installed, but I can't remove/hide Apple's own apps at all. The best I've managed to do is drop all of them in a folder together and ignore that folder.

I'm finding the whole navigation thing kind of frustrating too. The lack of a standard back button -- as you have on Android -- means that different apps seem to do different things in terms of allowing back navigation. I'm also still unsure how you can easily task switch (if there is a way of doing that it's not obvious to me).

Another thing that's frustrating me is "AirDrop". I tried to use it to get the screenshot you see above onto my iMac but nothing I did would make it work. The iPod would see the iMac and the iMac would see the iPod but the filed didn't appear to want to move at all.

Yet another thing that seems rather unstable is the whole business of WiFi sync. That seems like a sensible idea -- let iTunes on the Mac know that the iPod lives on the same network and have them sync that way. Problem is that I'm finding that it drop out during a sync more often than not. The only reliable method of doing a sync that I've found is to use the USB cable.

I've yet to write the blog post about my experiences with the Mac so far but what I'm finding here fits in with what I've found with the Mac: some of the ideas are really rather clever but they just don't quite work as well as people would seem to want to have you believe. Apple gear has this reputation of "just working" and I'm finding that this really doesn't seem to be the case at all.

Still, it's all a learning process and I know far more about Apple gear now than I did a week or so back, and I'm learning more as I go.