AlexRaiano.com | All Things Alex Raiano…

Jim Muller inspired me to take a look at the growth of my digital photos and videos collection. As you can see, I really started to generate more content when Alex was born (2005).

Your brother-in-law asks you to be his best man via email :).

Hey!

I know I am at your house but I thought that this would be most appreciated through an email so… Will you be my Best Man?

Let me know dude!

Rob

Today was a lot of fun because I had the day off and I got to spend it with my son. Here are some pictures from today as well as a short video.

In just a little over a week I’ve already learned a lot about my Mac. Other then a couple of quirky things, I really like OS X and how it works. In this short amount of time I’ve come up with the following observations:

Installing New Apps Is Easy: All you need to do is download a .dmg file, double click on it and drop the .app file into your Applications folder. That’s it! Some applications bring up an installer when you double click on the .app file however, for the most part all you need to do is drag and drop the app in the applications folder.

AppZapper is your friend: Uninstalling apps on the Mac isn’t as easy as installing them. Yes, you can delete the app out of the Applications folder however, more then likely there will still be extraneous files that are left on your system after you delete the app.

This is why you need AppZapper. AppZapper allows you to delete an application and all of its’ extraneous files so that you don’t have anything left behind when you delete the app.

This is especially great for me since I’m trying out new apps on a daily basis. I don’t know why Apple hasn’t included a similar app with OS X. In any case, AppZapper only costs $12.95 and it includes lifetime upgrades for free! Not a bad deal IMHO…

You can right-click but it is a pain: This has been one of my biggest annoyances with my new Mac. In the world of Windows you pretty much always have a two button and right clicking is easy to do. On my Mac, I only have a one button trackpad so when I want to right click I have to hold down the CTRL key. This really is annoying for me however, I’m starting to get use to it. You can plugin a two button usb mouse and that provides you with a right click however, when I’m using my laptop I don’t always want to use a secondary mouse. Why doesn’t Apple believe in the two button mouse? Isn’t it more inntuiative to have two buttons instead of having to hold down CTRL? Just my .02…

Apple-Tab Isn’t The Same as Alt-Tab: Apple-Tab kind of works like Alt-Tab on Windows however, instead of switching between all open windows it switches between all open applications. I’m not sure I like how this works so I downloaded an application called Witch. This application allows you to switch between windows similar to how XP does it. I’m not saying that the OS X way is wrong all I’m saying is that it’s different. As of right now, I like the Windows way better.

Samba is great on the Mac: Thanks to Samba, connecting to my Windows file server was super easy. In fact, I was extremely suprised with how well it worked. I’ve used Samba before on linux and it didn’t seem to work as well as it does on the Mac.

That’s pretty much it for now.  I’m sure I’ll have more to say as time goes on…..

For those of you who don’t know, I recently purchased a MacBook with 2GB of RAM. That’s right, I bought a Mac! In just three short days I’ve already learned a lot about OS X and I am actually starting to feel at home. I’m kind of suprised with how comfortable I already feel considering the fact that prior to this laptop my only experience with a Mac was at the Apple store and through everything I’ve read about OS X.

Here’s what I’ve done thus far with my new MacBook:

• Installed several apps including: Office, AppZapper, Taco HTML, VLC, Software for my printer, Firefox and several other applications. Installing software on the Mac is great. No longer do I have to worry about the Windows registry
• Setup my email and several other applications including iChat so that I can communicate with the rest of the world. iChat is pretty sweet but I’m not sure how much I am actually going to use it.
• Connected my camera and a usb thumb drive just to see how well OS X handles other USB devices. Needless to say it worked like a champ.
• Played around with the entire iLife suite including GarageBand and iDVD. I think I might put together a DVD for Alex’s two year.
• Played around with most of the System preferences
• Got connected up to my network. This was the easiest wireless connection I’ve ever made. In fact, I was able to connect directly to the network during the initial setup once I remembered that I had to add my MacBook’s MAC address to my Linksys router (check out my video).

The only complaint I have thus far is in regards to the lack of a two button mouse. As you can imagine, trying to right click with a one button mouse is kind of difficult. Every once and a while I plug in a good old two button mouse just so I don’t have to screw around with the ctrl key. Anybody know why Apple insists on going with a one button mouse? It just seems like it is extremely inefficient to be using only one button. In any case, here’s a video that I took while I unboxed my MacBook. Stay tuned for more Mac/Apple info. I plan on updating this blog often with more informatio on how the switch is going.

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On Monday we had a lot of ice and freezing rain. Luckily for me I didn’t have to work so Shell, Liss, Alex & I all just hung out at home for the entire day. Here are some pictures from the event.