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Tell me about your first time...

Benjamindaines

Benjamindaines

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The first time you played with a Mac OS X machine what was the thing that blew you away / was your favorite?

For me it was the whole "pop" sound and bezel that came up with you changed the volume. Yeah, I know trivial but it just blew me away coming from OS 8.
 
I loved the Dock and the windows, the whole GUI really except for the pinstripes. Also, the multitasking was just eye-opening.

I was very apprehensive about using OSX for the first time and my first experience with it was OS 10.2... but I was so glad to get rid of the Control Panel and extension conflicts.

Still not impressed with the way fonts are handled though. Not sure what they could do but Font Book just had to be developed because before that it was very confusing to the newcomer.
 
Hmm, I wasn't very impressed with OS X when I first used it. That was version 10.0. It was slow and clunky and the G3 iMacs I had it running on were choking for life. There weren't any useful native apps for it either.

But if I had to name one thing that looked cool on it, it would be the fast user switching animation.

Now on Tiger, I'm much happier with OS X. It still annoys me on a regular basis, because I can't do certain things on it easily like I can on XP, but hell I love my iBook!
 
Benjamindaines said:
The first time you played with a Mac OS X machine what was the thing that blew you away / was your favorite?

For me it was the whole "pop" sound and bezel that came up with you changed the volume. Yeah, I know trivial but it just blew me away coming from OS 8.
Click to expand...

I didn't like it, actually. I couldn't put shortcuts in the apple menu anymore 🙁

and I'm still not wild about the dock...

but I love the way it performs. Rock-solid stability, and much better networking than OS9. And truthfully, iLife is what got me hooked. I can't believe how much fun I've had with GarageBand 🙂
 
The first time I saw Mac OS X was with the public beta which had the liquid effects in the progress bar, which was almost the first thing you saw, and that impressed. I was also impressed with how much of the CPU such effects took to run. The borderless windows were quite a nice change.

If I would see Mac OS X now, for the first time, I don't think I would like the look of it as much but I would be impressed by the fact that you didn't have to play with memory numbers to get everything to work.
 
For me, it would have been when I bought my G3 iMac back in 2001. It came preloaded with 10.1, if memory serves, so I spent a bit of time familiarising myself with that and generally getting used to the changes from OS 9. I liked the cleaner look of the GUI, especially the icons, and found the Dock useful straight away. There was also the new and exciting experience of an app crashing and not taking the entire machine down with it. 😛

One thing that really bothered me at the start was that there was some kind of bug with the date and time settings – I can't remember exactly what it was now, but I think it would only display US-style month first dates despite being set up to display proper British date settings. Just a small thing, but it's always the niggling little details that annoy me immensely.
 
Dock, Dashboard, Aqua, Exposé, Spotlight.
Though I didn't learn all these features immediately.
 
The first thing that blew me away about OS X was the icons, they are such high quality and amazing compared to the the os i was using at the time (2000 Pro).

The first thing about macs that blew me away was the G4 cube, I remember seeing it in circuit city and the thing that amazed me about it was the power button, being little i just saw this white light glowing on the top so i touched it and the computer went off 😱 i was freaked out because there was no visible button just the bezel, i thought it was so cool and along with clear studio display CRT I looked like none of the other PC's there.
 
All I remember is starting my degree (in 2003), and having never used a Mac before, having to sit down in front of one and get started. Everything was fine until the program I was in beachballed, and I realised that I had no idea of any shortcuts, and ctrl+alt+del evidently wasn't the one I needed. 😛

I picked it up very fast (which is a nod to the excellent operating system) and after a week or two was definitely finding it infinitely more pleasurable to use than Windows, and pretty much haven't looked back since.

The thing that was the first wow factor was probably the dock or the incredibly intuitive drag and drop stuff — like installing and uninstalling programs. That or Expose, but I think I found out about that later. In fact, a guy at uni who had been using Macs and OSX for several years was all "What the hell was that?!" when I hit F9, which amused me. He wasn't really a "read the manual" kinda guy though. 😀
 
Well, my first time didn't last as long as I'd have liked, but I think it'd have to be the dock and it's genie effect that caught my eye and made me want to go back for more.

There's a lot to be said for eye candy.
 
I refused to make the switch to OS X until just under 2 years ago. Partly because I felt it would slow down my old G4 sawtooth. So I upgraded my G4 and installed Jaguar and wish I did it sooner. I was most impressed by how stable it is. It just never crashes for me ever. OS 7-9 ..I got crashes at least once a day.

Besides that, it's beautiful in so many ways. It's really why I love using my Mac and not my PC.
 
I was doing very amateur videos using a small panasonic, a PC and Pinnacle. My nephew came by with his eMac and Final Cut Express. I knew Macs were suppose to be really good with stuff like this, but I was really impressed none the less.

A few months went by and I was at Fry's picking up some KVM gear. I walked through the Apple section and stopped dead in my tracks. There before me was a just released Powermac G5 2.0 Dualie with the outer cover off and connected to a 23" ACD. There was a kid playing with it. I asked him if he saw that really cool game around the corner and he took a quick exit, leaving me to 'jump on'. A salesman came by and gave me a tour of OSX Jaguar. I cannot explain in words the mind-blowing effect it had on me.

I have worked in micros since 1983. I could not imagine ever feeling totally captured by one again. But, I was and knew I had to have this machine.

So, here I am now:

MVC-025S.JPG

MVC-024S.JPG
 
I think I was really impressed with Aqua and the facility of multitasking. This was an iMac G4 with probably Jaguar on it... I only played with it briefly and had relatively little other contact with OS X up close before I took the plunge with Tiger a couple years later!
 
OS X was on my first Mac machine, an iBook. Yeah, the eye candy was/is great. But, just the stability of the OS was what really blew me away. Still does.
 
Force Quit. It really worked as it should unlike Windows Task Manager.

Reminded me of my mainframe days. Solid OS. Loved it.
 
Benjamindaines said:
The first time you played with a Mac OS X machine what was the thing that blew you away / was your favorite?
Click to expand...

The first time I used OS X I absolutely hated it. I was looking for a UNIX like OS for a notebook because Linux didn't have the full hardware support I needed at the time. OS X seemed to feel like a UNIX but everything was a little weird. It took me around 2 weeks to get the OS X vibe, from that day on I couldn't consider using anything else as my desktop OS.

So to answer your question nothing I hated the OS. If you were to ask me now what I like about it? It would be the amazing speed that the OS runs on the Intels.
 
I thought this would be a switcher thread, but if we're talking about coming from OS 8-9...

In 10.0 it was the transparent title bars and the huge pretty icons. But it wasn't actually useable for me until 10.1... then I was impressed by the true multitasking (no more sitting and starting at splash screens!) and stability of it.

PCMacUser said:
It still annoys me on a regular basis, because I can't do certain things on it easily like I can on XP, but hell I love my iBook!
Click to expand...
I don't doubt it, but what things can't you do easily?
 
The dock was definitely the thing that got me to switch. Well, that and all the fancy GUI. It was a PAINFUL upgrade as it took an entire week to fix all the bugs, but once I got it working I wondered how in the hell I functioned without it?

Plus, getting rid of the ATM Manager thing was EXCITING.

Fishes,
narco.
 
Benjamindaines said:
The first time you played with a Mac OS X machine what was the thing that blew you away / was your favorite?
Click to expand...

The first time I accidently discovered the Dock Magnifier. I thought I was having an acid flashback. 😱 🙂
 
having used x window for so many years, it was nice to see true transparency along with a transparent terminal program. fortunately, x window has compositing now
 
apfhex said:
I don't doubt it, but what things can't you do easily?
Click to expand...
The two things I wanted to do this week that were difficult or impossible were turning on hidden files and folders (which is possible, but requires typing some commands in a terminal window - or about 5 clicks of the mouse in XP)... and sharing drives across a network (which is impossible under OS X).
 
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