Thursday, June 21, 2007

Switching to Mac Day 0 part 2: setting up

Along with the Macbook, I also purchased the DVI out dongle so I can attach my LCD. Doing a dual display is pretty painless on Tiger. In Windows, doing dual display usually depends on the graphic card driver. On some it's painless, on others it can be difficult, especially when you want to re-arrange the order of the display.

Couple of catches on Tiger:
1. If I want to place the dock at the bottom of the screen, I can only do that on the primary display. Not as flexible as moving windows' taskbar.
2. The menu bar can only reside on one of the displays. Whichever display it's on, it becomes the primary display. With the way the Mac OS' GUI is setup, if I have an app open in the secondary display, I must go to the primary display to access the app's menus. In windows, each app has its own window/menu bar, so this is not a problem.

My Logitech Z-10 USB speaker was automatically detected, and the volume keys on my Macbook's keyboard correlates to the volume on the speaker itself. Other advance features like shortcut buttons and the LCD display on the speaker don't work though, since there's no official Mac driver from Logitech.

I also purchased Apple's Mighty mouse, since it seems that no other manufactures make a bluetooth mouse that doesn't require its own dongle. I want bluetooth since the Macbook only has 2 USB slots. 1 is already taken up by my speaker. Bluetooth setup is pretty straight forward. It will take a while for me to get used to the mouse. The tiny scroll ball feels weird at first, but prett easy to get used to. The hard part is doing a right click. Another annoyance is the inability to have/setup a back button for internet browsing.

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