It’s now two weeks since we added a Mac to our arsenal of machinery. After some minor teething issues, mainly to do with finding various characters on the keyboard, we’re both agreed that it works very nicely.

I’ve used a lot of unix variants for work, and found the file structure of Mac OS X (which is based on BSD) to be a little different from Debian, Gentoo and Solaris, so all kinds of files and daemons weren’t where I expected to them to be, but stranger still, most of them have a UI component to control them.

It’s like riding a bike with the front and back brake levers switched around, odd at first, but adaptation is swift.

I’m particularly pleased so far with Spotlight, the search facility, which appears as good as Google Desktop on Windows (I nearly wrote “on the PC” there, but that would be silly (because an iMac is a PC)).

So far we’ve added Adium, TextWrangler, Spotify, Picasa, Google Earth, Zattoo and Open Office. I also managed to add 15 years of archived email with remarkably little effort (the beauty of having used Thunderbird and it’s predecessor Netscape Messenger which use sensible UNIX mailboxes).

I’ve also walked through the process of setting up WordPress, which required a few extra minor steps when compared to a Windows / Linux setup, but overall everything works as well as a linux box, but with a pretty and stable windowing interface into the bargain (my linux preference BTW is xfce).

There’s not much else to say, except, suggestions for great Mac apps are welcome!