I've been trying to keep track of all the things I wish I had known about the TiBook before I began using it on a semi-regular basis. Nat's weblog entry got me thinking about putting my list on-line, so here it is. Some of these things are surely due to my lack of figuring things out, but the Mac is supposed to be easy to figure out, right?
Reboots - I know that OS X "is Unix" under the hood, but for a Unix box I find myself needing to reboot it way too often. It seems that nearly every software update I get requires a reboot. What's up with that?
Screen Resolution - My ThinkPad T23 has a nice screen. It does something like 1440 x 1050 resolution quite nicely. I'd have thought that this beautiful TiBook screen would be capable of a little more than 1152x768. Sheesh.
External Displays - When I plug in an external display, there's no way to make the menu bar appear on it. This is really frustrating when I plug in my 21" Philips monitor. The TiBook can drive it at 1600x1200 (or even higher, but this is my preferred resolution on a 21" monitor). So I have to drag the pointer back over to the comparatively little TiBook screen just to pick a menu item. This is really, really dumb. Either I'm doing something wrong, or someone at Apple forgot to engage their brain on this one.
Connectivity - There's no obvious way to connect to the Samba server running on one of my Linux boxes. Why would I want to do that? Because most of my Office documents are stored there. I suppose I could install WebDAV on the Linux box and treat is as an iDisk, but why should I have to do that?
Power Management - I'd like to be able to close the lid on the TiBook and NOT have the machine go to sleep, lose all network connections, and so on. I'm a bit puzzled as to why there's no option for that. What if I want to close the lid while a CPU-bound task runs all night?
Point-To-Focus - There's no way to get "point-to-focus" in the Mac GUI. Heck, even Windows lets you do that if you install TweakUI. Anyone know if this is fixed in 10.2?
Posted by jzawodn at August 26, 2002 01:13 AM
Connectivity - You mean "Go... Connect to Server" isn't intuitively obvious enough for you? I was doing that just yesterday to connect to a friend's Samba share.... it even scans the network now and everything looking for smb shares (unless maybe you're still running 10.1?)
External Displays
... can't you just drag the menu bar over on the other screen from the Display control panel? I can't bother to hook up an external display to my powerbook, but that's how it used to work in OS [789] and I think I've used it in X too.
Samba
oh, from 10.2 you can connect to samba stuff...
Resolution:
Guess your out of luck here. Seems that the new Tibooks have larger resolutions though. (But still no larger than 1280 x 854)
Re: Reboots
Trying to make Windows users feel at home?
You might find some useful info about keeping your TiBook awoke in the Apple technote 88064, see http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n88064
I was under the impression that PowerBooks go to sleep when the lid is closed because if they kept running they would generate too much heat. The heat is supposed to dissapate through the keyboard, which can't happen with the lid closed...
You should do that same report on a Dell. Think about this. If you load new system software, shouldn't you restart to load it? Really, how many updates required a re-boot over the last 6 months? I've had an iBook for 1 1/2 years and I've re-booted it less than 10 times.
