You know those funny ads where the cute sort-of-bohemian Mac Boy wins out over dorky PC Man? That has kind of been my life since I got the iMac. But instead of being the Mac Boy, I am the dorky PC Man who has suddenly been transported into the hip world of the Macintosh. I keep expecting it to do what my old PC used to do, and instead am faced with a cleverly designed machine full of ironic references which I only vaguely understand. And many of the basic procedures require me to learn computer handling another way.

For instance, window management. You'd think I'd be familiar with windows (Windows) by now, but when Mac puts one up, it's an adventure. You only have to click your mouse once to get it to do anything. If you click twice, the machine is confused. The window appears to be trimmed in simulated brushed aluminum. There is a mysterious little oval at the upper right corner of the window, which seems to show or hide icons if you click it. At the upper left is something that looks like a traffic light on its side: three round buttons , one red, one yellow, and one green. I would think that red means "stop," yellow means "careful," and green means "go," right? Well, clicking on red makes your window disappear (though the program isn't off, the way it would be on a PC). Clicking on yellow causes your window to be sucked down a spacewarp and shrunk into an icon at the bottom. If you can find this icon again and click it, it will re-inflate into your work window. The green button, as far as I can see, doesn't do anything useful. It changes the size of the window, but why would I want to do that? Down at the lower right corner of the window is a grey corner angle which, if I drag on it, will make my window the size I want. If I click the green button, the window returns to the size I had it before. Or something like that.

Then I want to save something I've been working on. Instead of having the "Save" command on the window, it has it on a list up at the top of the whole screen. How do I know what I'm going to save? Maybe it's saving something I inadvertently "disappeared" by clicking on the wrong thing! If I want to open another program, I click on the colorful icon down on the "dock" at the bottom of the screen, and it bounces as if it is eager to be activated. Which I know is a lie, because in my experience no computer programs really want to work. Some of my more elaborate programs, such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, heave themselves onto the screen as reluctantly as I heave myself out of bed. And if I click on the wrong thing, Adobe disappears from the screen entirely.

As a former PC user, if something disappears from the screen, that means it's GONE. Macs have ways of hiding things so I think they're gone, but they're not. And then when I don't want something to be gone, then I find I've destroyed it. I dragged an icon that didn't look right into the "trash bin" and emptied the trash, only to find that I hadn't just deleted the icon, I had deleted the whole program. There was no poisonous yellow triangle with an exclamation point to advise me, "You are about to delete a whole PROGRAM, stupid, do you really want to do that?" Instead, I deleted my entire copy of Photoshop, and had to re-install it from the CD. Maybe Macintosh expects all its users to be hip young men in soft black sneakers, who have grown up with computers and understand technology without even being instructed in it. But that is a whole other topic for another day.

I have succeeded in seizing up my Macintosh. It's a lot harder to do this than on my old PC, which would seize up at any opportunity and give me the dreadful red X that said I had done something illegal or immoral. When I confuse my Macintosh, it turns my cursor arrow into something referred to by Mac users as the "Spinning Beachball of Death." This is a multi-colored spinning circle which signifies that I am a stupid Mac user who can even make this marvel of technology fail. Fortunately, re-starting it always works. I am used to re-starting, because I had to do this with my PC all the time. I am wary of a computer which stays on too long and handles too many programs together, without giving me some kind of complaint or just plain quitting.

One thing I do fit into with the Macintosh demographic is the visual arts thing. Arty people are supposed to have Macs. I have never had as luxurious a display as this 24-inch diagonal screen. It makes my pictures look like something out of an iMax (not iMac) movie. Printing them on my printer is another matter. Even with the current downloaded driver for the printer, my pictures come out kind of grey and dim unless I fool around artificially enhancing the image on Photoshop. Which fortunately I was able to re-install without trouble. I will be even more glad if I can install and use Painter 9 (or upgrade to Painter 10) without getting too many spinning beachballs. That's the thing about Macintosh. It's too good for me. I need to absorb more computer hipness and cleverness, before I can be worthy of it.

Posted at 3:40 am | link