New iMac: a Longer Review

As previously posted my new iMac came in on Thursday; I’m quite impressed with it. The first thing I noticed is the screen. My screen is a widescreen 16:9 format, 20″ along the diagonal. Coming from a 12″ laptop screen, this is ginormous! I have let to watch a DVD on it but am looking forward to it. At first I figured it would have less area than my 4:3 20″ TV, (and the total area is. [The reader is encouraged to work this out for himself.]) but neglected to consider that since a DVD plays in widescreen there is more viewable area on my widescreen monitor than the TV. (How much is more math than I cared to attempt since I had the epiphany last night.)

Other subtle effects are also nice; I love the way the keyboard feels; the keys respond at less pressure than a traditional keyboard, which translates into less movement and more comfortable keying. Also the keyboard has 19 F-keys which are nice if you want to assign Exposé, Dashboard, or Spaces to an F-key.

Speaking of which, the program Spaces is quite nice. Essentially you can set the computer to have up to 16 different ‘spaces’ where you can have different programs or instances of a program, (like web browsing for item x in space 1 and browsing for item y in space 2, etc.). The cool thing is that you can rearrange the spaces and even drag a window from one space into another! Switching between spaces is as easy as hitting ctrl-# (or ctrl-№) of the space you want.

A program I’ve been playing with is GarageBand of the iLife suite. Garageband lets you put loops of music together as well as record real or software instruments (which can be played with the keyboard) to put together music tracks or podcasts. I, being not terribly musically inclined, can’t play the instruments very well but enjoy the feature where it’ll take a genre give you a choice of instruments and put loops together to create a song.

I tested out the video chat feature with my brother yesterday, which was quite fun, I’ll have to encourage more of my friends to get video cameras.

iWork is another phenomenal program suite, it completely blows MS Office out of the water. Keynote (Slide show program) has such great 3-D transitions, although my favourite is the cube, where it appears that the slide is rotated as if were on a cube to reveal the next slide. Confetti is also fun where the slide exploded into virtual confetti to show the next slide. Pages (word processor and page layout program) is great for making family newsletters and posters. (We’ve used it for our Nativity letters.) Now in the ’08 version there are more themes and templates. New to the suite is Numbers (spreadsheet program), which I haven’t had much time to play with.

And finally, is Front Row and the Apple Remote, Front Row turns the computer into a media centre, allowing you to play music, movies, look at previews for movies, and show pictures from iPhoto. Also the remote controls Keynote and iTunes, (and probably others but I haven’t found them yet).

Well that’s it for now, next post will (likely) be on eucatastrophe, as requested by popular demand.