My Macbook Pro 17" 4 Weeks later

Why buy one?

I did not take this decision lightly.

I was in the market for a Mac because of my iPhone and web app business I am part of. The decision was formed in my mind that the other two guys were able to swap data and test the apps much easier than I could. @Matttakhar would have to create a special build for me and email it. Admittedly we all use the mighty dropbox now which could smooth the transfer, but I digress.

Secondly for the website design and a few graphic related tasks I was finding my home PC (a 4 year old HP) was starting to creak. Mind you I hasten to add the HP PC has been a great work horse machine, and has out-shone many PC's for a good period of time. However the fans inside the machine and including the GFX board one too, are starting to kick in all too regularly, even after taking my Dyson to the open side to suck up the dust.

Anyway I have a MacBook Pro 17" i7 with 4GB memory and the 7200rpm 500gb HD, with antiglare screen. I bought it with AppleCare and a few other items. Apple Charger, Magic Mouse and remote.

First Impressions

Taking it out of the box was a really treat and experience. It was packaged up simply and nicely. Manual and recovery disks were in a separate pack inside the box, a bit like the iPhone (or perhaps the iPhone borrowed from the MBP)

Once I had plugged in the magnetic power supply (very cool) and turned the device on, it was an absolute breeze to setup. Too easy.

In fact I found the whole thing just too easy that I did not believe it. And I still don't.

In fact I am still wondering where's the catch on this device and Mac OSX. 

I quickly put on Firefox, and Chrome as alternate browsers to Safari. The jury is still out on Safari. 

I was glad to be able to setup XMarks to sync all the browsers bookmarks etc, and Spotify existed on the Mac (Phew).

List of apps added:-

• Spotify
• Balsamiq
• Dropbox
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Xmarks
• Skype
• Growl
• Notify 2.1

Most other things are web based Apps which were platform independent.

Performance.

Well you have to understand my PC was 4-5 years old. I thought it was quick. On the MBP if I click to open Chrome, its opened instantly. I mean instantly, the browser window is there ready to go. Stunned.

Intense gFX operations work instantly.

iTunes makes no fuss and boots instantly, I am not sure if this is because I have not imported my library yet.

I like Growl and Notify. Very very cool.

What also makes me smile is going to the Apple trailer website and being able to click on the full 1080p HD trailers and expanding it out to full screen and watching the trailer without any jitters. Combined with my 50meg internet connection those trailers are ready to play in sub 10sec.

I quite like the Photobooth or more to the point the kids love the photobooth application that comes with MacOSX.

The Hardware

Well the 17" is a beast of a laptop. Especially to someone like me who has not needed a big phat laptop for my job and always had the luxury of smallish ultra thin laptops. At home there is a Netbook which was donated to us in our time of need and that is small with a 11" screen. 

So this is a radical change.

At first I thought it was heavy, but I have progressively got used to it. The length (front to back) lends itself to putting your wrists on the laptop which eliminates the bad posture.

The Keyboard

Ooooooooh it lights up. Yes the actual keys are backlit, and change brightness depending on the darkness of the surroundings.

However even with the British keyboard layout, Apple have opted to stick the "@" key shifted above the 2 key. And of course the """ key is where the "@" key was on a traditional UK keyboard. Annoying, a small minor niggle.

Another really really useful and cool thing, and bear with me on this one, I'm sure they have this on iMac's as well, but my function keys all have functions and you don't have to press a

Fn key to access them. 

I mean the really useful stuff like, CD/iTunes/Spotify controls, brightness up and down, mute, eject, and the really uber cool ones are for Expose (tile app windows) and the gadget up which brings up things like Calendar, Weather and calculator.

With all this simplicity I am getting back into keyboard shortcuts.

Pressing cmd and spacebar brings up instantly a Spotlight search bar to search anything on the laptop. Really cool.

And another handy one especially as the resolutions is quite high, keep your finger on ctrl and do a mouse scroll (using the trackpad use 2 fingers, on the magic mouse 1 finger) and you zoom in and out wherever the mouse pointer is pointing. And its fast, very responsive.

God I even like the little LED light on the magsafe connector for the mains power, its amber when its charging and green when its charged. Apple have thought of almost everything. There are major, major computer manufacturers who still do not think of things like this. Or more to the point strip it down to reduce cost.

The Trackpad

This took some getting used to. I bought a Magic Mouse as well, but have given both a thorough crack at getting used to them and I am glad I have put in the effort as they both make sense, and infect when I go onto Windows based laptops I find myself swiping and tapping the trackpad in an effort to reproduce the magic timesaving tricks you can on the Mac. Even the forward and back browser swipes (three fingers left or right) make perfect sense. 

The Magic Mouse

I have heard a lot of controversy when these came out. Along with the iPhone the Magic Mouse should be a design piece. It is a beautiful object to look at. It is aesthetically pleasing to the eye the gloss finish tempts you to touch it. 

There are no buttons as such that you can see, rather the who mouse acts as a button (with the same ease of click as a normal mouse button click).

The whole top surface acts as a swipe pad, so you can scroll up and down with acceleration using a finger swiping across the surface. Browser back and Forward is 2 fingers left or right.

Open/Close

OMG - Ok so most of the time on a laptop I rarely shutdown unless I know I am going to be without a power source for sometime. From a laptop closed lid, I swing open the lid and literally I am there. The full OSX desktop is there.... where I last left it. Incredible. No slow loading or larking about. Its just there ready to go.

Battery

I have no experience of past Macbook battery life performances and thus nothing to base it on. However for such powerful laptop Apple seem to have done a great job in squeezing out power to achieve a good 7hrs without sliding down known power hungry components. The funny thing is my Netbook probably has the same battery life, but with the 12th of the processing power.

 

I like the OSX battery indicator telling me how long until its fully charged and then if the MBP is not plugged into the mains it tells you how long it has left (the latter being nothing new).

Initial thoughts

Whether its the power, or the simplicity of the OS and the hardware, but I am fast learning that the laptop is there to just work and not hinder your creativity. You don't have to worry about things. They just work. It enables you to get on with it.

Things that are a little different to the PC world are there for a reason and when you learn it, you realise what the hell did you do beforehand. 

Things just work.

For example, use Safari to view an Apple film trailer (in 1080p) and it just opens quicktime without hinderance or a dialog window. It just does it, and it does it elegantly, without complaint. Try it on another browser on the MBP and you can see it is not so elegant, but it does it. Do it on a PC and it messes up. You have to click the trailer twice to actually get Quicktime to open, but it then opens 2 Quicktime trailers both trying to download 170gb of HD trailer <slap forehead>

I feel I need MS Office, but I for once in my life asking myself do I really need it? Will it just clutter up a perfectly running machine?

I wrote this on the built in TextEdit app that comes with the OSX operating system, not on some fancy word processor. Interesting. Probably because I don't want any formatting issues which tend to get carried across when you cut and paste into a CMS.

In summary

It just works and not only does it just work. It just works very elegantly and stylishly without compromise. A machine for right brainer's. In the words of Ferris Bueller "If one has the means I highly recommend picking one up"

ADGoT Just released SliderTwigz 3.1.1 with Game Center

Yep its true. Apple finally passed the iOS app SliderTwigz into the iTunes Store. Its another little step, and includes the Apple Game Center functionality to allow players to see their scores on the Game Center leaderboard. Well done to the ADGoT team, and thanks Apple. For more info check out the ADGoT blog.

My Experience with Covent Garden Apple Store

I was there.

No not at the Covent Garden store in London. I was there. Watching the the live event of Apple releasing the new iPod Touch and other iPod's. 

Whilst getting the kids in the bath I had the event streaming to my iPhone and watching Steve Jobs and his team present various new iterations of their already proven technology. God does Apple know how to create the hype. Even I was hyped, and I am pretty cynical about things.

But in the all important pre-amble to build up the crowd. Steve proudly showed some pictures of 3 new flagship stores around the world. Shanghai was one, and Covent Garden was the last. Steve laboured the point about these stores that they had spent lots of money designing and in the case of the Covent Garden store restoring the building and being sympathetic to the surroundings. 

At that point I decided I needed an excuse to go and finally have the Apple experience. Because you know what? My local Apple store in Southampton sucks badly for me. Its location is already in the very busy shopping center known as Westquay. But Apple's store design at Westquay is just a long store. with the wooden benches running down the middle and both sides and its busy. Busy with students and youngsters all pawing the technology dreaming about the day they too could own a piece of magical technology.

On the odd time I have tried to go in there I get claustrophic, its a little bit too warm because of all the people and trying to get help immediately can be a little bit challenging. Most times I abort and get the hell out of there.

Covent Garden

So I decide that for a particular project I was going to buy a new laptop. A moderate i7 Macbook Pro. Thought might as well if you are going to spend with Apple do it in style and not skimp.

I check the spec's online. Persuade my wife that a trip to London to take the kids to the London Transport Museum in Convent Garden could coincide with me nipping into the Apple store. The trip is set.

We arrive in London on Sunday lunchtime. Important to note try and find parking on single yellow lines on a Sunday. Its free. A space appeared near Aldwych and I quickly made my way to Leicester Square where I dropped the kids and wife. 

The London Transport Museum was great for the kids. Both girls 6 and 3 throughly enjoyed walking and running around the place, seeing all the old methods of transport.

After a few other activities I was finally greenlighted to go into the new Apple Store Covent Garden. I walked in. It was busy, but not mega busy. It was spacious. I like the raw brickwork, the atrium with what looked like natural light. 

A pleasant girl with a Eastern block accent attend to my needs. I stated that I was wishing to purchase a new MPB. She wanted to show me the machine and discuss options. I stated I already knew options and was ready to go for it.

Problem #1

In the store they only do standard models. Anything customised needs to be ordered online. Crushed as I wanted the fast HD. That was it. Experience and dream over. The assistant did her best, she took me to the Genius Bar upstairs which only confirmed my fears that *yes* I should have the faster HD and *no* they dont do it in store.

I then left tail between my legs back to my wife and kids empty handed. Until I got home and then ordered the machine online.

Problem #2

I suppose I live in the Amazon world of next day delivery of things that are in stock. I know it can be done, I know merchants can deliver goods very fast. I thought that the might of Apple they would have a huge stock of MBP's of my spec which could be shipped immediately. But no.

I had to wait almost 2 weeks for the goods to be delivered. Gutted. 

Dont get me wrong. When the gear came through I was ecstatic, the experience really started as I un boxed the kit round a friends house. Everything was immaculately packaged and well thought out.

Even turning the laptop on was exciting.

2 Weeks Later

It is still exciting. I know its a laptop. But it is actually like a weight has been lifted from me when using a computer. 

Things just work. I ask other MAC users what I should install on my new machine and they smile and say. Nothing. Everything is there. 

What a joy. Setup easy. 

Stuff just works.

People say (mainly Mac owners) once you go MAC you never go back. I not sure I could do that, as my day job demands a Windows 7 based machine. But I will give Mac owners this. All the hard is taken out of the equation so you can get on and be creative. And you are being creative on a great looking and performing piece of kit, which gives you extra oomf.

I'm sold.

Working Hard on ParentHelper

So here it is. I have been working with some friends to create a new app for the Apple iPhone platform.

Tricky, as there are, as Steve Jobs says hundreds of thousands of apps on the iTunes app store. Some of them brilliant, some are silly and funny, some of them get deleted within 5 minutes of being installed. And thats where we wanted to make a difference. We wanted to create an app with longevity.

So there is the problem, how do we write an app and stand out? We tried looking for niche market,which is very dificult considering the range of apps that exist. So we went back to grass roots and looked at what was common to all three of us and what we would all be passionate about.

We came up with some basic concepts for ParentHelper. What crystallised it for us was we watched a TV programme on British TV on Channel 4 called Dispatches. The programme highlighted that a disturbing amount of children were moving onto secondary school without the skills for basic arithmetic.

A quiz that the teachers gave kids and teachers was put onto the channel 4 website for us to try and see what results we got. They were disturbing both in the programme and for the adults that I knew in our local neighbourhood, who all took it that night and posted their results on Facebook.

Even I will freely admit that I had forgotten how to do long multiplication manually on a piece of paper, because I don't do it, I use a computer or a calculator and we seem to be accepting that as the norm and thus expecting our kids to think that is the norm. So the miss out the basic structure of how to do things on a piece of paper and understand what is really going on.

So we decided that our app should be a step by step interactive guide on how to do the arithmetic so that parents could help teach their children.

ParentHelper was born.

It has taken us a while to develop and get through the Apple review process. But we are there now a version that works and works with iOS4 and the iPhone 4 platform.

We have loads of ideas of extra functionality we want to see in the app.

Big thanks go to Matt over at matthewtakhar.co.uk and Andrew D for all the hard work.

We are hoping for great things not least because of the subject matter.

Anyway now back to playing Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies