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.

For a long time now Chrome has been my web browser of choice. It has, to some degree, become my "other emacs" (ignoring for a moment that my use of GNU emacs has sort of lapsed the last few years). By that I mean that it's a portable environment that serves me well on many operating systems and, for one of my machines, actually is the operating system. I really appreciate how Chrome's sync lets me feel right at home no matter which machine I'm on.

But I've run into one small issue that's kind of annoying.

In some situations I find it pleasing, and I find it makes sense, that some web "apps" open in a window of their own rather than in a Chrome tab. On Windows and on ChromeOS this is simple enough, all I need to do is find the "app" in the Chrome app launcher, pull up the content menu, and tell it to open as a window.

Nice and simple¹.

Now, the Mac, so well known for doing everything every other OS does but doing it better and being easier to use.... you'd expect it's at least the same there, right?

Nope.

There's no option at all to open as a window!

So, on the Mac, while I'd love to be able to open Gmail as a window/app in its own right, I'm totally out of luck, it seems. I've no idea whose "fault" this is. It's not clear to me if this is a Chrome/Google decision or if it's about how things have to work on a Mac. Thing is, I find it hard to believe that it's the latter given that Google Keep runs in its own window on the Mac and I can happily pin it to the dock.

Hello, world.

So I've decided that it's time I had a blog again. An actual blog. Not a set of posts on Google+ or a torrent of 140-character thoughts on twitter but an actual blog.

Part of the reason for this is that there's a couple of personal coding projects I want to have a go at over the next few months and writing about them as I work on them might be fun. Another reason is that I've being wanting to explore the business of hosting a blog on GitHub pages for quite some time and now's the perfect time to do it.

So how am I doing this? Well, for starters, I recently acquired an iMac. The reasons for how and why I chose to do this are varied and mostly uninteresting but what it does mean is that, for the first time in quite a long time, I have a Unix desktop machine again. This fact alone means it's nice and easy for me to play with the likes of Git (or, at the moment more GitHub for Mac than the command line git), ruby, Jekyll and SublimeText (along with a rather nifty package for quickly kicking off a blog post). So that's how I'm doing it. Writing it all locally and pushing it up to GitHub and hosting it with GitHub Pages.

As this goes on I imagine much will change. I've started out with a basic setup, created by simply using:

davep@Ariel:~/blogging$ jekyll new davep.github.com

From now on I'll be playing with styles and my own layouts to see what I can come up with and what I like (although, I most say, for the most part I'm actually liking the clean look it delivers out of the box).

One thing that's obviously missing right now is a facility for commenting. That's something I'll look into should I feel it's necessary -- from what I've seen elsewhere it's easy enough to make use of something like disqus. Update: This has now happened.

One other thing I might look at doing is putting this behind my own domain. For the moment it's only available via github.io and I guess it might look nicer if it was actually available via a URL that looks like the name I've attached to the blog. Update: This has now happened.

Anyway, that's it for now. Time to push this up and think some more about where it'll go from here.