Fateful Day in Shinjyuku
The photos above are from last Sunday, when I took that fateful trip to Shinjuku to pick up my new iBook.
I have been struggling to get aquainted with it, and I figured the best way is just to do it. I decided from Monday that I would not use the Windows anymore. From then on my goal was to do all my regular work / play on the iBook. Needless to say, I got very little done. (and I wound up using the Windows to meet deadlines)
For the most part I am satisfied with it. --at least I was until today. Playing with all the new stuff is fun, and having a familiar command line made me happy, so although it was a struggle to get used to not having some of the great little functionality on the Windows I could be content.
I haven't been able to find a suitable text editor yet. BBedit seems to be the best, but still leaves some things to be desired. If I find time I'll make my "text-editor wish-list", in case anyone wants to make a good one for the Mac.
Even then I was relatively happy. I thought it was not near as slow as the Macs at work, and was comparable to my (four-year-old) PC. That was until I tried to use Photoshop. Amaizingly slooooooooowwwwwww. How can it be that my PC from four years ago kicks a brand-new iBooks butt? Don't processor speeds double every six months? It's not like this is a G2... why is it so slow? Since then I have also become annoyed at the slowness of opening menus and right-click dialogs too. Not that it would probably do any good, but I want to turn off the annoying anti-aliased look. Why is it so soft? I don't have time for it to make all my letters look nice, and the corners of all my windows smooth and round. Whose gonna see it anyway? They should just put all their efforts into making the little things better, rather than worrying so much about the design and look of the package.
But, I'll probably get used to it, and I'm sure I'll find some things I like better about it than Windows, so don't pay much attention to my ranting. I'm just cranky because I have four days of un-done work backed up.
Comments
that is the only problem I have had with my G4 PowerMac, slow program launches, slow menus, help takes forever to launch http://www.antipixel.com/blog/archives/2003/08/05/help_viewer.html . I only have 256MB memory but I'm sure if I double that it should be smooth sailing. How much memory did you get with the ibook?
Posted by: mark | November 8, 2003 12:46 PM
I have 256 now, but I have a 512 laying on the shelf. I can't put it in because the screws are too tiny. I have to get a new screw driver tommorrow.
But I'm not sure it's the memory. I have the Activity Monitor open and it says I have plenty of memory left. The CPU usage however is almost aloways neat full if I even move the mouse.
Posted by: kevin | November 8, 2003 01:24 PM
that's not good... what are your top tasks/processes eating all that processor time? im not sitting infront of my mac now but i think you can do it via command line with the command "top"
Posted by: mark | November 8, 2003 02:04 PM
I would say that the RAM is it, Kevin. My original iBook was maxed out with 288 MB RAM, and I had to sit and watch those icons bounce in the dock for a long time before they came up, even if it was the only program I was running.
Apple was giving rebates on RAM upgrades when I ordered the eMac that came this week, so I maxed it out at 1GB. Very fast launching now.
Posted by: nils | November 8, 2003 02:28 PM
I hope your right Nils. It should all clear up when I stick in the new memory.
Mark, top shows the same thing as Activity Monitor, just doesn't have any of the nice graphs.
That's one thing that is a plus for the mac so far. When a program kept hanging the other day, I could just switch to Activiy Monitor window and kill it. I was really afraid when people at work would marvel at Ctrl+alt+del on windows that would let you kill single applications. Aparently they couldn't do that on their mac? They said the only thing they can do if something hangs is to restart the computer. And things were always hanging.
Ultrabob tipped me off to a nice app called Dragthing, which acts like the Windows application bar. I was really getting tired of using expose, which requires just too many steps.
1) Click button 3 (or whatever you have set to make everything rearange itself on the screen)
2) Mouse over every little window to see the label so I can tell if it is the window I want to bring to the front.
3) click on it to bring it to the front.
to top it off, if I am toggling between two windows, the position keeps changing when it goes to small windows mode. I can never anticipate where it will be, so I always have to mouse over to see the file name. Am I using Expose incorrectly?
Posted by: kevin | November 8, 2003 04:10 PM
I haven't installed panther yet so I can't give any expose tips. However, I can tell you that maxing out ram helps tremendously. My ooooold ibook came with only 128meg, and it got a lot faster when I upped it to 384.
However, moving to the g4 powerbook made everything quite snappy. I haven't tried the new g4 ibooks yet, but they should be roughly the same as my year old powerbook. One final note, I've got 1gig of ram in the 'book...
Posted by: John M. | November 8, 2003 09:47 PM
BTW, photoshop 7 on the powerbook feels about the same as on my 1.8Ghz p4 dell at work.
Posted by: John M. | November 8, 2003 09:48 PM
Lots of RAM and Panther makes it a little quicker
Posted by: james | November 8, 2003 11:03 PM
I had 1Gb of ram in my iMac and it didn't bring my 1Ghz iMac close to competing with my 800Mhz Windows machine with 386 or something Mb of RAM on tasks like photoshop and dreamweaver. that is what prompted me to go G5. I hope you experience a better improvement.
Posted by: UltraBob | November 9, 2003 07:21 AM
Activity monitor is new with OS X - MacOS 9 didn't have a similar functionality, and had "issues" with how it assigns memory (ie one bad app can kill the machine).
Posted by: oli | November 11, 2003 05:52 AM
Hate to say it but an iBook is a really underpowered machine. The G3 processor is six years old now. Several bumps in the clock cycles over those six years haven't been enough to keep up with anything like Moore's law. Combine that with the spindle speed of the disk (4500 RPM, I'm guessing) means that regular Photoshop work is not going to be much fun.
You need lots of RAM regardless. You also really need a G4, I think.
Posted by: Kirk Samuelson | November 12, 2003 04:15 PM
Kevin, sorry to revisit this old thread but what text editor did you settle with? I'm setting up my notebook and searching for a few utilities. I heard a lot about bbedit but I mistaken and thought it was freeware or had a "lite" version.
Posted by: mark@vudeja.com | May 21, 2004 11:06 PM