I got a shiny new MacBook Pro at work a week ago and I have to say I’ve been struggling with it to date. I haven’t used a Mac seriously since university (some 10+ years ago) and the transition is taking it’s toll.

Now the machine sure is sexy, as is the scrabble style keyboard we got with it, but at the moment I’m just not sure it’s for me. I think I’ll get through it but right now there’s a long way to go. I’m just finding it very disorientating, all the little things I was used to and that I picked up over the years on the PC are no longer there. It’s amazing how these little things add up very quickly. When you have to stop and think about how to do things you just did naturally it can make you quite grumpy :) Just writing this blog is proving quite trying. I press the End key on the keyboard to go to the end of the line and end up at the end of the page for example.

The 2 main pain points for me are the keyboard shortcuts not being the same and the applications not having there own desktops. The latter point being quite a significant one for me in that when I go into an application I like to be focused on that application. Having all the Photoshop and Illustrator palettes being open next to each other means having to second guess which one is the one I want. Getting used to the Spaces feature (which from initial uses seems very powerful and handy) may help alleviate this problem but time will tell.

Saying all that there is lots to like about it. It’s amazingly fast, the OS has some really interesting features and the System preferences are done really well. No more getting lost 6 clicks deep in a Control Panel setting anymore. Spaces and Expose seem like great features too and hopefully, when I get used to them, I’ll find I have a better sense of place and space when using the OS.

I must confess too that I’ve had the uninformed view that Mac is Style over substance. That, like a Ford versus a BMW, both get you from A to B. One is just more stylish and has nicer appointments than the other but they both do the same job in the same amount of time. I’ve chosen the PC because it puts me in the seat of the average punter, I see and experience what they experience so feel closer to them in that sense. On top of that I don’t have strong connections to “things” as such which seems to be an Apple user trait.

And lastly I’ve found the level of arrogance around Mac’s to be a turn off. I feel Mac users have a sense of superiority that a BMW driver may have (maybe that’s my problem though), and the fact that Apple has to be-little Microsoft to differentiate themselves fuels these views and I think is unnecessary. But hey, I’ve gone down this path to find out for myself if this Mac loving hooha is justified. More to come on this one no doubt :)

I manage the Queen Victoria Market website which you could say is a bit of an icon here in Melbourne and it has a huge number of people passing through it every week – for good reason too. Every month I get usage stats from the website and there is not normally much that stands out, basically the stats don’t change that much – until last month that is. When I glanced at my Google Analytics stats I noticed a gradual build up of traffic which peaked towards the end of the month and I didn’t realise what it was straight away. So I did a quick check and of course it peaked over the Easter long weekend, and the 4^th most popular page (after the homepage and market page) was a new page that QVM had published through our CMS that contained the Easter Trading hours.

No epiphany here but it’s great to have data confirming that most people are more often than not just looking for basic information. They are rarely looking for detailed information on the history of the market, they will do a tour if they want that, but just the basics they need to know. That’s not to say the website shouldn’t have details on it’s history, it should, but the basic information needs to be what is up front and easy to find.

Funny thing is that I actually went to the QVM website in the lead up to the Easter long weekend as well, for exactly the same reason as everyone else. And kudos to the QVM team for creating a page with these Easter trading hours on and making it prominent on their homepage.