So let me give you a little history here. I'm a programmer by trade and have been developing on a PC for about the past 10 years. The company I worked for built software apps for internal use at a major bank and developed primarily in SQL Server and .NET (C# and VB). Thus, this was my forte. Economy, blah, blah, blah, I get laid off, but still have a great relationship with my now ex-boss.
It's been about a year now since my lay-off, but Ed (that's my ex-boss) gave me a call to talk about getting into building iPhone apps. He's been a huge Apple fan for a while and all of his computers at home are Apple. He tried to convert me a while ago, but I feared that first step into this world completely unknown to me. But Ed was very persuasive and I was digging all the free iPhone apps myself and was pretty into the concept, so I checked out the free developer kit from Apple with great anticipation. My hopes and dreams were immediately squashed, however, when I found out you need a Mac computer to use it (insert many raspberries here). I was bummed.
I talked to Ed and he said, "So get a Macbook." Again, the fear of the unknown, the investment into something that I had no clue about. I took the leap. I did it. I am typing this post into my new 15" MacbookPro, 4 GBs of RAM, 320 GB hard drive, all that happy stuff.
So here I am, a PC girl trying to figure out this Mac world. Basic stuff, like how to copy and paste, how to use the mouse trackpad for crying out loud, learning a new operating system. So far, it's been conceptually the same. It is a little frustrating while typing. I need to get used to the keyboard commands. I will say I am digging the trackpad after figuring it out. The whole pad is a button, so no more left or right mouse button or fumbling to get your thumb on the correct spot. The pad is a little uncomfortable to press. I find I have to press a little harder than I would like. But after turning on the ability to tap for a click in my system preferences, it made all the difference in the world.
Another thing I really love about the trackpad is the ability to scroll using two fingers, wherever your fingers may be on the pad. It's the same concept as the roller ball on a mouse and I've always loved that feature, so it was important for me to have something similar with a trackpad. I hate having to move the mouse cursor over the horizontal or vertical scroll bar and clicking over and over again or dragging the bar to see the rest of a page. Yay! I don't have to. This is so much more elegant!
Ready for more elegance? Using three fingers, you can "swish" back and forth between pages you're viewing in Safari, which is Apple's default browser application. No Internet Explorer here folks. That's strictly a PC thing. Pages look basically the same, but now you can easily navigate instead of needing to press the backspace key to go backwards or click the back button, though that option is still available on a Mac.
One other thing I need to get used to is the fact that there's no backspace key. There's a delete key, that acts as a backspace and deletes one character to the left, but there's no comparable PC delete key that I've discovered yet, that will delete characters to the right. As of right now, I'm arrowing to the right of what I want to delete and hitting the delete key. A little annoying, but I'm probably just not aware of how to do it.
So these are the things I'm discovering and I thought I'd share with other PC users out there who may be afraid to take the leap into the Apple world. This is my experience, coming from a die-hard PC girl. We'll see how it goes.
