Got MacBook?

As I mentioned a while back I was getting a MacBook. I've had it for a while now, and I'm loving it. There's still bugs in OS X of course (exhibit A and B), but it feels much more solid and polished than XP and Vista. And even though the MacBook is the entry laptop made of plastic the build still feels solid. I got the middle version and upgraded to a 250G HD, which made it identical to the black MacBook but 800 SEK ($140) cheaper.

After a couple of days I had most of the system in place. This is most of the software I've installed that I felt lacking from the beginning:

• Transmission, a bittorrent client
  
• Mactex, a LaTeX distribution
• Aquamacs, an editor (I also tried Carbon Emacs, but Aquamacs felt better integrated)
  
• NeoOffice, an office suite (the OpenOffice OS X version is really terrible, don't bother trying it)
• iSquint, a video converter to convert video to mp4
• Firefox 3 beta 5, a web browser. Safari is actually quite nice and speedy too, but lacks the plugin support that Firefox has. I'm currently mostly addicted to Piclens (not yet available for Safari 3.1) and Foxmarks for synching bookmarks between computers.
• SqueezeCenter, a music server for my SqueezeBox. Also added the lazy search plugin which is truly excellent.
• Skype, a chat program
• VLC, a media player
  

After having transfered all my music and images to the MacBook that was pretty much it. I've been using iPhoto quite a lot of the software that came with the computer. I tested the Aperture trial download, but decided it was not for me. I don't want to mess around that much with my images.

I've remapped Caps Lock to Cmd and F5 to Spaces and added two finger tap for right-click, but left most other settings unchanged. Oh, I put the touchpad acceleration at max as well.

The two finger scroll (in both directions) is beautiful and I find myself doing that on my work PC laptop as well. What I'm still getting to grips with is the different keyboard shortcuts. Using e.g. cmd+Backspace for delete, Fn+right arrow for page down and Fn+down arrow for end of page takes some getting used to. Finding the backslash (Alt+Shift+7) and other not so common characters we're also tricky and not the same as on a PC. But I'm getting there.

All in all I'm very pleased with the MacBook and OS X. Highly recommended.