Nativity

I'm having a wonderful time getting back to a Mac. As much as I can, I'm trying to work as natively as possible for a couple of reasons. First of all, I think that any computer you buy ought to just work out of the box. But also, I still think like a support person, and want to be able to work with things in the default configurations. I could spend days customizing my Mac to great extremes, but then if I need a "go by" while I'm supporting someone, it's not going to look or work like theirs does, and I want to be able to support what I use. That's part of the inspiration for using MacMail, which is in my opinion one of the best pop mail clients available. That's why I use Time Machine for backups also, and why I'm still using Safari without any add ons. That's a bit of an adjustment because I'd gotten very used to Firefox's keywords with bookmarks and used them nearly exclusively when I was browsing.

I do like Safari's Top Sites though and am making that transition easily enough. It's no hard thing for me to leave my favorite web mail clients for MacMail, although if I wanted to I could pop those webmail addresses as easily as I pop anything else.

But if I had to pick one thing that I like better about Windows than Macs however, it would be Windows Explore as opposed to Finder. Finder is certainly more robust in it's ability to, well, find things, but when it comes to file management and moving things around, I still lean towards Windows Explorer.

Many Windows users that I know have never even used Windows Explore, and to be fair, probably not many of them have a real need to. But I moved files around a lot, to and from portable drives and so forth, and I'd gotten very used to Explorer.

What I'm finding with the Mac is that theres much less of a need to move files around the way I did in Windows. Part of that is because of the way I'm streamlining I know, but I wonder if the reason I'm streamlining is because I find Finder just slightly more awkward than Windows Explorer? I've copied all of the important docs that I use to my Mac, and they're backed up regularly to an external USB hard drive via Time Machine, so I'm finding I don't use my flash drives as much. It's nice that everything is in one place and I don't have to worry about formats and whether what I save on one PC will look the same on another which is very nice.

But I'm finding that the Mac is enabling me to have a cleaner, simpler user experience, where I can actually USE the computer and not spend so much time making sure it's useable.