Help the Mac Newbie

[Arwin]

Hi,

I just got a Mac Mini for iPhone and iPad development. I got it with the Magic Mouse and was happy to find it works pretty well with my DiNovo bluetooth keyboard as well (though for some reason I have to press the discover button each time the Mac has rebooted).

As it's a nice little device and very low on energy consumption, and I'm curious about these things in general, I'm trying to see how much of the work I've been doing on the Windows 7 computer I can also do on this device (for a lot of stuff, logging into the office using Cisco VPN and doing a remote session on our test environment Terminal Server would do the trick)

But I also definitely need some basic advice. Like why can't I get fonts to display properly on my screen? They look horrible, a little like Safari does on Windows as well. I've tried disabling font smoothing for LCD, and also disable it for fonts smaller than the largest settings, but that's only marginally helped for some of the UI.

How can I get it to look as clean as under Windows 7 or even the iPod Touch/iPhone?

 

[flynn]

How can I get it to look as clean as under Windows 7 or even the iPod Touch/iPhone?

I'm really curious about this as fonts have always looked fine on my Macs. Could you post or send an uncompressed screen capture (command-shift-3 will leave a png file in your desktop, or command-shift-4 if you want to capture a specific region/window)

What OS version are you running : Tiger, Leopard, SnowLeopard?

 

[nutball]

I had the same problem - the default OS X font anti-aliasing looks like arse compared to Windows (not that Windows is any sort of gold standard, it has issues too). As far as I've found from some Googling, there's little you can do improve matters beyond playing with the font smoothing under the Appearance panel.

 

[rpg.314]

There are no Mac noobs. There are only Macolytes.

 

[Mize]

Snow leopard changed font smoothing for the worse. You can fix it with a shell command, nut I don't remember it. I suggest googling snow leopard and LCD font smoothing.

 

[Malo]

Cisco VPN and terminal services work on OS X. I've done it myself with specific employees who want to work from home. You can download the terminal services client from MS.

 

[Arwin]

I'm really curious about this as fonts have always looked fine on my Macs. Could you post or send an uncompressed screen capture (command-shift-3 will leave a png file in your desktop, or command-shift-4 if you want to capture a specific region/window)

What OS version are you running : Tiger, Leopard, SnowLeopard?

Hi mmendez,

I run SnowLeopard. I found out that the smooth settings options on there are more limited in the user interface (as Mize suggested), but you can still do this:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 1

where 1 is lightest smoothing, and 3 is heaviest.

This helped a little for sure (a lot for the small OS/X fonts). The article I got it from however explained my feelings on the subject exactly, and I found a tonne of hits confirming that current Windows just handles smaller fonts better (though mostly just because they're using fonts that have been hand-optimised better for low-resolution)

http://osxdaily.com/2010/02/18/change-font-smoothing-settings/

A good example is Beyond3D itself. I've been using the default vbulletin skin so far, but it looks rather terrible sometimes. The new B3D skin looks much cleaner.

Cisco VPN and terminal services work on OS X. I've done it myself with specific employees who want to work from home. You can download the terminal services client from MS.

Thanks Malo.

The fonts so far are my only disappointment. Other than that I'm definitely finding the Mac pleasant to work with. Sure there are some strange quirks here and there that I have to get used to, but mostly very few complaints. It's hard to express how thrilled I am with being able to use the right mouse button on the Magic Mouse.

EDIT: here's what it currently looks like, after the settings I added (smoothing off for font sizes under 12 - though I'm not sure that setting even does anything - and smoothing set to light with the command used above). I'll add a picture with what it looked like before later, and one from a Windows machine.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Make sure you set up Exposé.

 

[Arwin]

Make sure you set up Exposé.

Thanks, that's a very good tip also. I was wondering where those features were hanging out. Was a little confused at first as it seemed you had to do something through terminal to set this up under previous versions, but in Snow Leopard it's in the regular preferences under expose and spaces. Spaces look like they could be useful too.

 

[Dooby]

Using Basecamp, install Windows XP, Vista or 7. That's how I solved all my Mac problems.

(Yes this is a joke, but yes, I hate OSX, there's no point in flaming me, I use it every day, and I still hate it)

 

[Arwin]

Using Basecamp, install Windows XP, Vista or 7. That's how I solved all my Mac problems.

(Yes this is a joke, but yes, I hate OSX, there's no point in flaming me, I use it every day, and I still hate it)

Yeah, I already have a Windows 7 machine. In fact, irony of ironies, that machine is going to stay my main machine for iTunes, because it's a pita to move the whole library to another machine and you can't have the library on two machines (not all of it anyway). Also, the Windows 7 machine is quad-core, has triple the HDD space, and is generally much faster at everything. However, the Mac Mini compensates somewhat by using almost no power whatsoever and making no noise.

But the thing is, the one thing I do like about the Mac is the software, both the OS and the default software it comes with. So I am pretty curious about what it is you hate about the Mac OS?

My current dislikes are:

- the (application specific) menu always on the top of the screen
- the fonts (I made it look decent, but it's not perfect and that should have been fine out of the box)

However, I like just about everything else. I really like the Magic Mouse - I'm sure there's more to be gotten from it, but the swipes for page forward backwards, the scrolling, and, very important, the RIGHT CLICK BUTTON!

I also made my first proof-of-concept iPhone App today, which is basically what I bought it for.

 

[Mize]

I prefer OSX to Win7 for an OS (although I tend to prefer linux to both).

Being able to drop to a shell and use pretty standard Un*x commands is very nice - no W7 sudo equivalent at all. I also find Win7's "Aero" to be, well, dog slow. I'm running W7-64 on a 3.6 GHz C2Q with 4 gigs and a 5870 comparing that to OSX on a MacBook Pro (2.66 GHz, 2 gig, 9400) and the interface on the mac is way faster. Why does it take so fricking long to log into W7 anyway?