Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

Welcome Mom to the Mac family!

Mom "took possession" of her new 17" SuperDrive iMac today. She would be the first to tell you she was a little worried about this decision. Only last week she declared, "I do not want a Mac". But now it's on her desk. And boy, does it look nice. Instead of the bulky black monitor and horrid beige tower, she has a beeeeauuuutiful little dome, arm and screen. And more desk space.

"Welcome to the Mac family!" I said, walking into her bedroom carrying the box.

Dad unpacked the box and set it on her desk.

"Is that it? Where is the tower?" Mom asked.

"No tower, it's all in there," said Jim, pointing at the bulb below the arm.

"What? How did they do THAT?" Mom exclaimed!

"There are some smart people down in Cupertino," he quipped.

"I guess so!", she confirmed.

Mom just about jumped out of her shorts when she pushed the power button and the Mac chime rang, quite loudly, from the included Apple Pro Speakers. I guess she hadn't heard that before, since I almost never reboot my Macs.

She went through the "Welcome" setup wizard, created a .Mac account, configured her email and internet connection settings, and got started. We went through the Finder, and all of the included applications, except for Quicken, World Book and games. She loves iCal. She loves iTunes, iPhoto, iChat, Mail, Address Book, and especially iChat. From the smile on her face, she loves tabbed browsing with Camino.

This Mac is fast. It's noticably faster than the 733MHz PowerMac G4 I'm writing this on... then again, it's loaded down with tons of server programs like WebObjects, FrontBase, Zope, Postgres, MySQL, OpenBase, and more.

I also installed Safari, whose SnapBack feature and integrated Google search field were immediately understood and appreciated. I showed her Sherlock, which I hadn't even tried once since Jaguar came out, and she liked that too. I was unimpressed to be honest. Watson is better, but I don't use that either.

Just wait until she finds out about custom icons. But please, I hope there's no "Cathy" theme on xicons.com.

By the way, if you haven't looked at Speakable Items or Universal Access (in System Preferences) since Jaguar came out, take a look! There are some sweet new features in there that rock.

Mom installed Microsoft Office herself. "You're letting her do that by herself?" Dad asked? "Um, yeah, you just drag the Office folder from the CD to the hard drive," I said. "Oh," he replied, leaving the room, growing more jealous each minute.

Anyway, Mom loves it, and Dad.... Dad tried to convince Mom that it sucked. Why? Because Dad thinks it would look better on his desk and is sure Mom would be much happier with his Windows 2000 PC.

I'm very happy and relieved that this iMac has found a happy, loving home.

I tried out InkWell on a $3000 WACOM LCD digitizer at the store today. Droooool. Handwriting recognition was fast and more accurate than on the Newton. The Griffin PowerMate is sexy, and I saw a cool USB-powered fan that I'll pick up at the end of spring. I saw a mouse with a water chamber containing a floating apple. Groan! (and it wasn't even optical, WTF is up with that?)

Hey, in a couple of weeks I should get Mom to submit an Apple Switcher story.

Eritrea, part of the coalition

BBC: Eritrea pressed over journalists

Eritrea is one of the initial 30 countries that the U.S. touted as being a part of the coalition of the willing. I wonder what their state-run media (the only media in Eritrea, apparently) is telling the public about this war.

Here we go again…

Politech : PayNoIncomeTax.com targeted by IRS, federal court order

Mom’s getting an iMac

I decided not to post this yesterday for fear that noone would believe me...

My mom is to become a switcher today! Her Windows PC self destructed and burned a hole in her wallet yet again last week, and after much debate, Mom has finally "let go" of her PC and is getting a brand new iMac.

Mom is heavily into arts and crafts and relies on some older versions of Windows graphics programs. She's tried the new versions and just doesn't like them! So she'll be getting Virtual PC to run a couple of her "classic" Windows programs, which will help her ease the transition over to the light side.

For email, she'll be using Mail. For web browsing, I'm going to set her up with Safari and Camino, and let her decide. Maybe she'll pick Internet Explorer, but I doubt it.

Wait until Mom sees NetNewsWire Lite, Address Book, iCal, iChat, iTunes, iPhoto, and iDVD!

This is going to be great.

Future Shop and Apple team up

ThinkSecret: Canada's Future Shop to sell Apple products, get retail reps

Last week I was in Future Shop and noticed they didn't have any Macs in the store, and didn't list Apple products in their ecommerce site. This is quite a relief, not only because I think it's important for Apple that Future Shop carry Macs, but that they will finally be sold properly.

If this turns out like it has at CompUSA (where the difference in shopping for Macs was night and day before and after Apple reps started staffing the Apple section), it will be a huge win for Apple in Canada.