The Mac move

by admin on February 6, 2006

The move to the Mac platform is almost complete. Apart from a few files, everything is now running on my shiny new Powerbook. OK – it hasn’t got the Intel inside treatment and I may yet regret waiting for the new machines to come through but…it’s terrific.

The last time I looked at Mac was a good 10 years ago. At the time, I couldn’t get to grips with it. This time around was a doddle. Everything is super intuitive and the widescreen 15 inch Powerbook is fabulous to work with. It fits perfectly with what I do, the screen is to die for and performance makes my IBM R51 look pedestrian. When we get our house done, this is the platform around which everything wll be networked.

Anyone thinking about abandoning Wintel should take a trip to their nearest Apple store. The tech support people – Geniuses they call ‘em – are truly knowledgable and will present you with all the right options for your situation.

My only three gripes are: no Bluetooth mouse with scrolling capabability, Thunderbird’s import facility sucks and Firefox refuses to render my site’s graphics correctly. So much for testing among open source geeks. Safari, here I come.

One side effect of the move is that I’ll be able to test a bunch of stuff on the new platform while my colleague David Tebbutt concentrates on Wintel.

  • http://www.sbishere.com/ Greg Balanko-Dickson

    Hi Dennis:

    Congratulations on the move to Apple hardware and software. I have been using Apple hardware since 1995 and have never regretted it.

    I used to use the same theme you are using for my blog but keeping it XHTML and CSS compliant was a challenge. One error and the page would not render properly in IE on Windows systems.

    One of the great challenges using WordPress is keeping the site compliant and unfortunately many of the shared themes are not compliant.

    The first thing I check when looking at a theme is whether it runs error free using XHTML 1.0 Transitional – if not I abandon it.

    The Kubrick theme that comes as the WordPress default is compliant and the theme I now use is also compliant.

    The problem with themes not meeting the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard comes from the way people hack CSS and paragraph and list classes to accomplish the layout they want.

    When I checked your site at the Validator at W3C (http://validator.w3.org/) your site came up with 54 errors. from my past experience that number or errors would bork IE and your users could have a challenge seeing the right sidebar.

    I do not know how many visitors visiting your site are Windows and IE users but on my site it is still over 80%. Using Firefox 1.5.0.1 on my iMac your site looks fine.

    I just wanted to share my experiences with WordPress and welcome you to the Mac community. If there is anything I can do to help, just let me know.

    Keep up the great work on your blog.

Previous post:

Next post: