I’ve finally made the transition to Apple’s operating system, OSX. I’ve not used it for more than 15 minutes in the past, and I’ve delved into it from a full understanding of Windows. Some things I find rather strange, but others I’m finding a lot better. I got a feeling that if I hadn’t been using Windows 7 for such a long time, with it’s “The icon is always there, even if the app isn’t on”, things would be far more confusing.

So far, the main differances that I’ve had to get used too are.

• Multi-touch Trackpad; use two fingers up’n'down to scroll, four fingers to jump from open-apps, desktop and current window, three fingers to go ‘back’.
• Trackpad is all one button, once you get your head around having two points at once, it’s better. For example, on a normal trackpad, you’ve got the two buttons and the pad itself, to drag something, you click the button down and use the pad to move it around. It’s identical on this, except you can click anywhere.
• Installing programs is a lot easier, you just open up the DMG file (a bit like downloading a ZIP or EXE), then it acts like a CD Drive has been inserted, and you just drag one bit into the other (for example, you drag ‘OpenOffice’ into ‘Applications’… walla, done). Sometimes there are the usual menus, sometimes not.
• The Dock is a bit weird-but-good, you’ve got your open programs, and a ‘Applications’ icon which acts like ‘Programs’ in the start-menu in windows, but you can drag them into the dock. This’ll make a shortcut to the program. If the program is running, there is a little white dot under it.
• The red ‘close’ button, which indicates closing a program or menu in Windows, just closes the window rather than the program. To close the program, press CMD+Q, which is the equivalent to Alt+F4.
• Maximise is a bit different, can’t work out how it calculates the right size, but it just does.

There is loads more, but this’ll do for now.