Paradigm Switches

Sometimes in life, you just need to switch things up. You realize you've been doing things either just a little less efficiently or outright wrong and you just need to make a jump into something different...

I hit this point over the last year and finally had the guts to make a major change. Yes, I bought a Mac Book Pro.

Some background: I've been a Windows (and DOS before that) user since roughly the 5th grade (that would be 1984/1985-ish, eeek) and part time Linux user on and off since 1994.  Other than two years in college, I've used those platforms (and a little Solaris) exclusively -- that's 25 years of experience.  Twenty-five years of learning shortcuts, time savings, and overall comfort on a computing platform.

All that experience, shaken up and shelved for now.  Well, sorta.  This is what I think so far:

Pros:

• I LOVE the hardware.  Seriously.
  
  
  
  • Dual video cards (one for low power, one for high performance)
  • Upwards to 8 hours of battery life.  (Lowest screen brightness and integrated graphics) used for web browsing in bed while watching TV.
  • Thin and light.  Put this next to my Dell XPS 17" work laptop and you almost have to laugh.
  • Trackpad is more than satisfactory.  I never used windows ones because they just could do anything useful.  Multitouch and integrated button on the Mac is infinitely superior.
  • At first, I didn't really care for the 'chicklet keyboard' but it has grown on me after a month of using it.  I believe I type faster and I also think it will outlast all my other laptop keyboards.  It also doesn't allow all that 'keyboard detritus' under the keys.
  
  
• Much better iTunes integration.  iTunes is actually useable on Mac OS X.
• It is awesome using a unix workstation again.  A real terminal/bash instead of cmd.exe.
• While I love Linux, Mac OS X just plain works.  No real tweaking necessary and everything has a very unified experience.
• Expose and Spaces are really nice, although I've yet to learn spaces enough to make it as quick as your average workspaces in X.
• Spotlight is really growing on me.  On my windows pc's, I used Google desktop and Launchy to get pretty similar experience but Spotlight mostly beats those two solutions, not the least of which by shipping on all Macs.
• Apple remote is such a nice little feature.
• Time Machine is simple and works.  Nothing compares on Windows. (I'll re-check that with Win 7 in the future)
• $9.95 OS update rocks (June purchase).  I was so tired of the $100 OEM updates.
• Growl rocks.  Yes, I've used Prowl on Windows and Ubuntu's libNotify or whatever they call it.  Growl is just plain better.
• Preview is simply the best quick application I've ever used outside of vim for text files.  Finally, a snappy application to give me a quick look at docs rather than waiting forever for bloated apps to start.
• Admittedly, you might laugh at this one: Desktop backgrounds rock in OS X -- I rotate backgrounds once a minute from a collection of very high resolution nature photos I've collected over the years.  This gives me more pleasure than I care to admit.

Cons:

• Under very heavy loads (gaming, etc) this laptop gets just as hot as any PC laptop I've owned in the past.
• Not all drivers are equal to their window counterparts.  Logitech comes to mind here.
• I know very few of the keybindings for everyday use and therefore, I am a little slow getting things done.
• Xcode is taking a LOT of getting used to.  I really would like to use it but I'm having a hard time transitioning.
• I've moved most of my everyday data (email/contacts/calendars, etc) to use web based solutions (99% Google) and trying to decide to use the desktop versions on a Mac is taking some getting used to.
• No delete key (ok, it has a 'Delete' key but it is really backspace and I never remember to use function-delete to delete forward)  You never realize how much you use the delete key until it's gone.  (Sorry Joni Mitchell)  The lack of page-up/page-down keys are a little annoying as well.  Command-arrows don't always work the way I want them to.
• Safari has its nice points but I grew to love Chrome.  Chrome just isn't there quite yet on OS X.
• "Mac OS X" is a pain in the ass to type and say.  Maybe I should just say Leopard (soon Snow Leopard) but then all non-Mac users would like at you like you collect chia pets.
• I DO NOT WANT TO LEARN YET ANOTHER LANGUAGE.  Why oh why did NeXT have to chose Objective-C?  Either keep your Java bindings or update Carbon to the current Cocoa feature set!!!
• I haven't found a Twitter client I like yet.

Undecided:

• I'm not sure if I like the new application model that Macs use -- I really like Debian based Linux distributions with apt + repositories (Microsoft really should have an app store...they are missing the boat) and Macs are only half way there with their software update service.
• I don't know where I stand on the Java integration.  Apple has backed off their original integrated design and don't seem to be keeping up on the Java front.  They need to either go all out or not at all and let Sun/Oracle provide the packages.
• Dock: I'm not sure if I see exactly the benefits of the dock quite yet.  It is mostly the same as the windows task bar but takes up more space.  I just might have to hide it.
• I haven't found Dashboard to be much different from alternative OS widgets.  At least they get their own 'desktop strata' on Macs.

Anyone have any other applications or tweaks I should be trying out?