Friday, October 17, 2008

So I'm using one of the new Macbooks

Yes, I'm in an Apple store at the moment, posting from one of the new Macbooks. It's very nice. The trackpad is really great. I mention that first because I'm sure at first glance, the first thing most people will think is that it'll be bad without a dedicated button. But actually, the whole thing being a button is very nice. It allows for a lot of productivity since you can click anywhere, and if you don't feel like doing that, you can click in the bottom as if it had a button there and that won't make it strange to use. I like it a lot. It's also very smooth and easy to run your finger on, so you'll probably like it. It's also really big, which is great. The button isn't too hard or too easy to click, so it won't be distracting. I also like the "gestures." It took about one second to get used to all of them and I really like it. For example, the four finger "swipes" to activate Expose is really nice. It's very functional and because of the smoothness, it's just a joy to do. There's various ways you can "secondary-click" (which is the Mac term for right click). One way is to set a region of the trackpad to be your "secondary click" area so that when you click there, you get the menu. Another way (my preferred way, which is very nice and functional) is to set it so that a two-finger tap brings up the secondary-click menu. It's pretty nice and easy to get used to, I really like it.
They include Spore Creature Creator on all the Macbooks in the store so you can test the graphics. I ran it for a few minutes and I'm very impressed. The new Macbook is great, I'm definitely going to get one.

Edit: I've found what some people might consider to be a fatal flaw. There is quite a noticeable amount of blur when things move on the screen. It's not so bad when it's slow, but if you're doing something like dragging a window quickly, it's pretty noticeable. When I dragged a window around pretty fast, icons in that window blurred a noticeable amount. This won't keep me from getting one, but it is kind of annoying.

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