Credit: PC. Easy as 1 - 23 taken by bfishadow on Flickr

After an active first day with my new MacBook Pro, I was expecting day two to be a fury of activity. Actually it wasn’t (I spent much of the day playing catchup). I’m still in “OMG! THIS IS SO AWESOME!” mode, much to the annoyance of some followers (talking to you Sean!). Deep down, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and become inundated with thousands of updates and programs I install as experienced on Windows. This touches on a subject touted as a fault in Apple recent advertisement, “PC. Easy as 1 – 23″. Windows and Mac update applications are very similar, each has their own update application which updates operating system, drivers, and programs specifically made by their respective company. The difference between Apple’s and Windows update is Windows updates are heftier. If you purchased a new computer without a service pack, you more than likely going to have to repeat the Windows update process more than once; Apple doesn’t have service packs though, they release new operating systems. That’s not to say that I didn’t have to run the Apple Software Update more than once, or restart my computer after an update, but on Windows this process is more annoying.

I found a quirk with iWork ‘09 I didn’t like. On my first day I installed the application with the intent of accessing old Microsoft Word documents. Usually when installing Word on PC, the application automatically assigns a file-type to the new application. I was hoping that iWork would do the same for Microsoft Word documents, but it did not, TextEdit remained as the default associated program. In order to change this, I had to manually assign .doc’s and .docx’s to Pages (not a difficult process, read how to do this here) but I wish there was an easier way to do this within Pages or during it’s installation.

I like to abuse Flickr as much as possible. I’m a hobbyist photographer and hated the process of uploading photo’s on the PC. The best way I found was using Adobe Bridge, then viewing the photo’s in Google’s Picasa, then upload with Flickr Updatr. iPhoto simplifies this process significantly, it detects the camera, manages the photos, lets you view and delete them, and you can upload them to Flickr. It doesn’t replace the Flickr Updatr, it does have some REALLY nice features, such as integrated geotagging. I really like iPhoto’s event system, when downloading photo’s from your camera, iPhoto groups them into events. You can upload the event to flickr, and iPhoto creates a set with the event’s name on Flickr, a helpful and time-saving feature! I will note, you can upload pictures through Windows Live Photo Gallery, it is not a part of Vista, you would have to download it from the Windows Live website.

Two days of using the MacBook Pro and its shaping my life outside of it’s uniboby frame. An example is my desk, which I’ve had for several years. It has survived three moves, cats, bumps, 3 computers and plenty of spills. It is a very pretty desk but also very uneven! When I first placed the laptop on the desktop, the screen looked uneven. I first thought I had broken my laptop right out of the box, but the desk has either warped, is uneven, or the floor is uneven. This may mean a trip to Ikea in the very near future! The MacBook screen has also helped my eyesight (strangely enough.) On my PC I kept the monitor in one setting, low contrast and low brightness. I never paid attention to the lighting in my room to realize I should adjust the settings when I turn the lights on or off. Increasing or decreasing the intensity helps deal with eyestrain. The MacBook Pro adjusts the brightness of the screen automatically based on the amount of light in the room. It does the same thing for keyboard illumination, a feature which I first thought was a silly, but has turned out to become very helpful!

I several questions left unanswered about the new Mac, with more creeping up every moment. A new one concerns mountain a shared folder on my NAS to my desktop. This seems like another Google search that I must perform.