I’ve been using os x at home for about a year now, but i just this week installed it at work. It’s interesting what a different experience it’s been at work than it was at home.
At home, i use an ibook, and it’s been running os x since 10.0, so i’ve had lots of time to play with it, get comfortable, etc. In fact, when 10.2 came along, i reformatted and did a fresh install without classic, and i’ve had a great time with it. Autumn is also running x on her imac; after i’d been playing with it for a few months, she wanted to try it too, and now she won’t go back. She even hates running classic.
At work though, things are different. I’m connecting to a windows server, running Quark & Photoshop, managing lots of email, and running a G4 desktop with a giant monitor. As i prepared for the update last week, i started to worry; i hadn’t realized how completely my work habits were wrapped in this cozy os9 world i’d created. I used folder drawers extensively, i had lots of little utility scripts (would they still work?), and i was very productive in that world.
Well, at the end of my first switched week, i’m about 90% productive again.
The good:
Re-creating shortcuts to project folders made the biggest difference - our organization (and server setup) puts things many layers deep.
After 3 days of looking, i finally found Pester, a replacement on my reliance on Palm Desktop solely for meeting reminders. I was this close to trying to write one myelf.
I did write a small droplet script to zip folders, something that you can do from the command line, but would otherwise have to shell out money to do with another gui program.
The not great: speed
Even though this hardware has a faster chip than my laptop, it doesn’t seem to run faster. The video isn’t enough to enable QE, which might be part of it. The whole thing is just a little sluggish, though the multi-threading helps somewhat.
Mail is also slow. I was able to import all my email and contacts from Outlook Express (big hurray), but with all that crap imported, it runs pretty slow. I’ll try paring down and compacting, to see if that helps.
Overall, i’m happy to be using x, but so far, it’s a mixture of trying to create a new, productive world and trying not to get distracted with the cool new things i can do.
