Chris Nelms

I have been playing lately with a USB relay board purchased from EasyDAQ. Their prices are not the cheapest by any means but their email support has been excellent. There are many different relay boards on the market and some of the cheapest appear to be on Ebay from Bulgaria, although I haven’t tried these. All the available boards I’ve seen are based around chipsets from a U.S. company called FTDI Chip. My card (pictured here) is based around the FT232BL chip and full details of this chip are available on FTDI’s website. The board is available with two relay options and I chose the ‘power relays’ with SPDT contacts that can switch up to 10A at 250v AC on the normally open contacts, and up to 7A on the normally closed contacts. It’s a useful relay which can operate most household appliances, and for higher power devices the relay board could operate a higher-rated slave relay.

The relay board can appear as a COM port on a PC. To initialise it each channel must be set as an input or output channel (relays are outputs but the chip also supports inputs, and some relay boards also offer opto-isolated inputs for devices such as burglar alarm sensors), then the relevant bit in a one-byte register is used to switch on or off a relay (16 relay boards of course have two registers, 24 relays have 3, etc). The neat thing about this arrangement is that because each USB board has its own address, the computer can control an almost infinite number of relays. The boards are self-powered from the USB bus but they have provision for an external 5v DC power supply if more than 8 relays will be closed at once.

The internet is flooded with shareware and freeware applications for these relay boards. There are numerous example programs in Visual Basic and C# but all the examples I could find were for Windows PCs. This is a good example of Mac users being at a disadvantage. EasyDAQ assured me that OS/X and Linux already had the drivers built-in but in my experience this isn’t the case. However I downloaded and installed a driver from FTDI’s website and instantly my board appeared in the Mac’s file-system as /dev/cu.usbserial-000012FD (the suffix being the board’s unique address; another board would have a different address). I could operate the relays from a Unix terminal window like this:

echo -e “B\x00″ > /dev/cu.usbserial-000012FD

This command initialises the 8 channels on the board as outputs. It only needs to be sent once when the relay board is first powered up. Having sent that one command, the relays can be switched on and off as shown in this example:

echo -e “C\x1f” > /dev/cu.usbserial-000012FD

This sends the byte 1F to register C, switching on relays 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5 (relays are numbered from 1, starting at the least significant bit). The trouble is, when I attempted to replicate this in an Applescript I couldn’t find a way to send the byte to the board rather than the ASCII characters (i.e. ‘1′ and ‘F’) that described the value of that byte. In the end the solution seems to be to place the actual bytes in a text file and send that file (or rather, its contents) to the board. Note that you need a text editor that can insert non-printing characters into the text file; the Unix vi editor can do this, allowing Ctrl+A as ASCII 1 which will operate relay 1, Ctrl+C as ASCII 3 which operates relays 1 and 2, etc. So my shell script became:

cat /users/chris/Library/scripts/Relay01.txt > /dev/cu.usbserial-000012FD

Looking at this now it’s blindingly obvious but it took me over a day to get to this point with some help from a Mac forum. My Unix days are too long ago. Having achieved this it was another faltering step to learn enough Applescript to encapsulate this shell script. The answer is:

do shell script “cat /users/chris/Library/scripts/Relay01.txt > /dev/cu.usbserial-000012FD”

Having mastered this I could draw all these bits together. The comprehensive rules facility in the OS/X built-in email client allows an Applescript to be executed when certain conditions are satisfied. I wired a mains socket to relay 1 and plugged my Anglepoise desk lamp into it, and created a couple of email rules. Now, when an incoming email arrives from my personal email address with my preset password in the subject line, and a command in the body of the email, the relay is activated.

You can see here photos of a demonstration (my apologies for the poor quality, I struggled to compose the shot to show the email on the Mac’s screen, the relay board, and the desk lamp). I also had difficulty getting the exposure right for the lamp being on and off so please take my word for it that it really does work. The command in bold red text in the email is purely for demonstration purposes. The font and colour are actually irrelevant. Since many mobile devices can send emails this ‘proof of concept’ demonstration shows how an email sent from anywhere can instruct the Mac to control an external device via the relay board. In theory you could switch the heating on when returning from holiday, or control various lights in the house to deter intruders.

Finally I slightly adapted a public-domain Xcode project written by Michael Cohen in Australia for the same relay board to provide an application giving direct control of the relays at the click of a mouse. Its simple user interface is shown here.

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Like all would-be record-keeping obsessives, I aspire to having an office devoid of papers and filing cabinets but with all my records at my fingertips on the computer, carefully filed by subject and date, and with metadata that allows me to locate it instantly during any relevant search. Of course this aspiration has yet to materialise; my desire to keep all documents (letters, bills, statements, drawings, ideas, pieces torn from newspapers and magazines, etc) means that the piles of paper awaiting scanning constantly dominate my desk. For the last ten years I have used a series of Hewlett Packard flatbed scanners with an ADF (automatic document feeder) built into the lid. HP make good hardware and the image quality is usually excellent, but I’ve always had the feeling that the ADF in the lid was an afterthought, a means of getting the scanner to do something it wasn’t originally intended to do. The first photo here shows my HP Scanjet 5590, purchased in around 2003. In theory I should be able to drop a stack of documents into the feeder tray, press a button, and then do something else. The reality is different. Documents that have previously been folded frequently misfeed or jam, or two sheets are dragged in together. This 5590 supports duplex scanning whereby both sides of the page are scanned but this process involves three slow passes of the paper through the feeder, any of which may result in a paper jam. Each pass requires the document to make a 180 degree U-turn around a roller. If the paper becomes jammed there is no easy way to expose the paper path to retrieve it. Even if the paper doesn’t jam, the scan rate is s-l-o-w. Working through piles of paper documents is a tedious process, mainly waiting for the scanner and checking for misfeeds.

For most of the last decade in which I have digitized my paper documents I have used a Windows PC, and my document management software was ScanSoft PaperPort. Like most applications it has features that are really cool and others that are frustrating. On the whole it was fit for my purposes and enabled me easily to scan my documents into PDFs and store those PDFs in a deep hierarchical arrangement of folders. ScanSoft is a PC-only application so when I migrated to the Apple Mac I looked for an alternative. I settled upon Yep, which describes itself as iPhoto for PDFs (iPhoto is the Mac’s built-in repository for photographs). I may post a separate article devoted to Yep because it is a really nice application. Suffice to say that Yep enables me to scan, organise, and later find, the PDFs that encapsulate my life. Browsing the Yep support forum the subject of scanners has been raised several times, and the model that received repeated praise was the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M (the M suffix denotes the Mac-specific variant of the scanner that is also available for the PC). After a particularly frustrating afternoon with my HP ScanJet I decided I would never conquer the rising piles of paper documents unless I used a better scanner.

It’s pleasing and easy to do research on the ScanSnap S510M scanner because nobody seems to have much bad to say about it. It seems to provide the features that everyone wants from a document scanner: speed, reliability, and simplicity. The online reviews, plus comments in forums and websites such as Amazon were all positive. One of the strong themes that came through was the inclusion of bundled software that integrated well with the scanner and the Mac. This clinched it. I placed my order and it was delivered the following day.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M scanner is one of those pleasing items, like the iMac, where the act of unpacking its box and setting it up, is a pleasure. Everything is neatly packed, there’s a printed list of what to expect in the box, and there’s even a paper quick-start guide, a rarity these days when a PDF is usually included on the installation CD.

With the ScanSnap there are three CDs to install: Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, Abyy Fine Reader for ScanSnap (a special version of the OCR program especially for this scanner), and finally the ScanSnap Manager, the software that controls the scanning process from the Mac. My one disappointment was that all the documentation only refers to compatibility with OS/X version 10.4, aka Tiger, whereas I have been running version 10.5 (Leopard) for over a year. I needn’t have worried. Everything worked perfectly. I knew the S510M was slightly out of date, its case colour having been intended to harmonise with the older white Mac whereas my more recent iMac is grey aluminium rather than white. No matter. The ScanSnap still looks pleasing enough sitting on the desk beside my iMac. My first thought was how small it is. The ScanSnap is tiny compared with my HP ScanJet flatbed, and the photographs on this page don’t adequately convey that. The ScanSnap is about the size of a loaf of bread; certainly smaller than our electric toaster. The outer lid hinges up to become the document feeder tray, and opening this automatically turns the power on, a blue LED clearly showing when it’s powered up. Inside is a separate articulated flap that folds out to form the paper catcher, although this is arguably unnecessary when the scanner sits on the desk; the two control buttons (power and scan) have been cleverly positioned to be easily operable when the catch tray is still folded closed.

In use, everything about the ScanSnap is exactly what I’ve always wanted. It works just like I want my document scanner to work. The warm-up time is negligible, barely noticeable at all, maybe a second or two. The speed of document feeding is impressive; I never have the feeling that I’m waiting for the scanner in the way I did with the ScanJet. There’s an option for the scanner to ignore blank pages. By default both sides of the page are scanned simultaneously (although you can turn this off if you wish). Documents can be saved as JPGs or PDFs, although the PDFs at this stage are strictly images; you can choose whether every page (or n pages) are saved as separate PDF files, or whether a batch of pages is saved in a single PDF file.  The ScanSnap Manager software offers to process each file using the Abyy Fine Reader OCR application which turns the PDF into one with text content that can be searched.  Alternatively, scanned PDFs can be dragged onto the Abyy icon in the dock for processing at a later time.  With auto-sizing every document, from a business card to a full letter or A4 page is scanned precisely.  Because there may be many different sized documents in a batch placed into the feeder tray I’ve noticed that smaller documents (e.g. till receipts or snippets torn from a newspaper) twist diagonally as they are scanned.  No problem, the ScanSnap’s software automatically recognises this and corrects the resulting image.  Very impressive.  In the very rare event of a misfeed, the cover of the scanner can be flipped open to reveal the entire paper path.  No more poking about with a letter knife as I used to have to do with the HP ScanJet’s document feeder.

 Drawbacks?  Well arguably I’ll still need to keep a flatbad scanner for the rare times when I want to scan from a book or magazine but I can envisage the ScanJet gathering dust while the ScanSnap sees daily use.  Cost is another; the ScanSnap wasn’t cheap but good tools often aren’t.  Despite the price I wish I’d bought a ScanSnap ages ago.

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It is over a year since I decided to switch from a Windows PC to the Apple Mac as my main computer. There are still some things about the OS/X operating system that irritate me, tasks that would be easier to perform in Windows, but on balance I don’t regret my decision. There are many features of OS/X that make me wonder why Windows didn’t include them years ago. Admittedly as I type this I’m using a Microsoft mouse from a PC instead of the Apple’s infuriating so-called ‘Mighty Mouse’, and I still hate this flat Apple keyboard which, despite being a UK model with a £ sign has several keys (@\|) in the US position, and there is no key for the # symbol at all.

I thought I would list the software that I have installed on the Mac during the past year, to turn it from an attractive desktop accessory into the powerful workhorse that I use daily. Clearly this list is just a personal choice but it illustrates how I have managed to migrate my key tasks from the PC to the Mac.

• Microsoft Office 2008 - This is the Mac incarnation of Office 2007 for Windows. It comprises five applications: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Entourage (email client) and Messenger (this last hardly counts as it’s freely available for download anyway). Sadly there’s no equivalent of the Access desktop database application which Office 2007 for Windows includes. Having migrated to the Mac I regret my dependency upon MS Office but its .doc, .xls, (and latterly .docx and .xlsx) file formats are so ubiquitous that I do find it essential to be able to create and edit these documents. Note that the Leopard operating system is familiar with these file formats so you can read any of the above formats by using the Mac’s Quick Look facility even if you haven’t got Office installed. Note that at the time of writing there is an infuriating bug in Office 2008 if you use the Mac’s Spaces system of virtual desktops. Switching to a different virtual desktop sometimes makes an open Office application try to ‘follow you’, or make it impossible to put the focus back on the Office application when you return to the original desktop. This bug is well documented in several forums. It is said that Microsoft blame Apple’s OS/X operating system for this bug which is curious since I haven’t encountered it with any other application. (And yes, I must explore Open Office as a free alternative to Microsoft’s offering).
• Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional - I hesitated to include Acrobat in this list. I am a huge fan of the PDF file format and use it extensively. However support for PDFs is comprehensively included within the Leopard operating system, so purchase of an Acrobat licence is unnecessary for me. Of course the capabilities of Acrobat Pro extend far beyond those of OS/X but if you just want to create, merge, view, and print PDFs there is no need to buy Acrobat at all when you have the Mac’s OS/X version 10.5 (aka Leopard). You can even reorder pages, rotate them, select text or add annotations. So before you buy Acrobat think whether you really need it.
• Yep - The authors describe Yep as “like iPhoto for your PDFs”. And it is! It is an application that provides a new front end to the Mac’s existing file system, but one that focuses solely on PDF documents. PDFs can be saved anywhere on the Mac, or in an orderly hierarchy of folders. Yep allows you to add a description or various other kinds of metadata to each document, or group of document, and then search and filter to find the relevant documents. Once found, documents can be viewed and printed, and there’s even a delightful ‘loupe’ tool that turns the mousepointer into a magnifying glass so that when a couple of dozen thumbnails are tiled on the screen you can still read the cover page of each. After considerable research this was the best ‘document management’ tool for my PDFs I could find. Its price is fair too.
• Audio Hijack Pro - An audio recorder application that can record digital audio from almost any source: a microphone or other hardware connected to the Mac, from iTunes, Skype, or the Mac’s built-in DVD player, and from MP3 files or webcasts. This last is my area of interest. I like to record programmes from the BBC Radio 4 ‘listen again’ webpage. Using Audio Hijack Pro I can set up a repeating schedule of programmes in the Mac’s calendar and AHP will wake up the Mac if it’s asleep and record the streaming Real Audio feed as an MP3 file that I can copy to my MP3 player or burn to a CD. AHP’s capabilities extend far beyond those I’ve described here and it’s well worth a look for anyone who enjoys listening to music or broadcasts.
• BBC Radio Widget - While on the subject of BBC Radio, a medium I just can’t get enough of, I must recommend this freeware offering. It’s a tiny, minimalist radio widget that sits in the Mac’s dashboard and plays all 60 of the BBC’s national, regional, and local radio stations. Just point and click the desired station from the list. The only other controls are play/pause, and a volume slider. Simple, neat, and it works.
• Journler - There are many so-called personal productivity applications that claim to change your life but in reality require you to alter the way you work or think in order to accommodate the software. Perhaps for some people Journler is like this but for me I am starting to like it a lot. It won’t change anyone’s life but it’s a powerful personal journal that accommodates all kinds of media formats. Journler makes it possible to track and locate these in a way that integrates neatly with the Mac. I did start to use Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software. It too has some really neat features but in the end I felt that Journler was a more polished, feature-rich tool for me into which to place all that fragments of life that I didn’t want to lose but didn’t know what else to do with.
• iBank - I looked at numerous personal finance applications before settling on iBank. I was looking for something similar to Microsoft Money that I’d used on the PC. Every application has some nice features but none has them all. For me iBank came closest. It’s not without faults and some strange ways of doing things but it despite being an American application it does work quite happily in a British context with Sterling or any other currency. At the click of a button it connects to my current account with the Nationwide Building Society and downloads all the latest transactions, permitting me to allocate spending and income to categories and reconcile my banking. If you used MS Money before migrating to the Mac, take a look at iBank.
• VMware Fusion - A PC emulator for the Mac. I won’t spend much time describing this because I have previously done so here. In brief it allows you to create one or more virtual machines, each running a different operating system, and exchange files between the Mac and the virtual computer. It integrates very cleverly with the Mac with several options. For those jobs that must run on a Windows platform this is a solution. I expected to spend half my time here when I first migrated from Windows to the Mac but nowadays it’s rarely used as I prefer OS/X.
• Roxio Toast - CD and DVD burning software. It creates and copies CDs and DVDs in a variety of formats, plus taking backups.
• FileZilla - A freeware FTP client for copying files to and from a web server or other host. On the PC I used to use WS FTP and this is very similar.
• Bento 2 database - This is a database from the publishers of FileMaker Pro that’s barely worthy of the name database. To anyone who’s used to proper relational databases, or even a desktop database such as MS Access, it’s little more than a card-index. What makes it useful and worth having is its well-designed integration with the existing Address Book and iCal (calendar) applications that come bundled with the Mac. Bento allows me to customize the data that is stored by these applications, then filter and select them by different criteria. Even pointers to emails can be stored in the database. Once I had learnt the Bento nomenclature, by which tables are called libraries, and what I would call a view (i.e. a set of records that meet certain criteria) is known in Bento as a collection, it all became clear. It makes two-way data exchange with Excel easy too, a feature worthy of praise. Worth a look as a personal productivity tool.
• StuffIt Deluxe 12 - a file compression and decompression utility that works with all the usual file formats (zip, tar, rar, as well as stuffit’s own compression format). For me coming from a PC it’s not quite as intuitive as Winzip but it works.
• Flip4Mac WMV - I just use the free version of this handy ‘fit and forget’ utility. Basically it permits the QuickTime player on the Mac, and the Safari web browser, to recognise and play Windows Media video and audio files. Because WMV is a popular format this gets a surprising amount of use.
• ReadIris Pro 11 - OCR software. On the PC I used Omni Page Pro which was excellent. I did buy a copy of Omni Page Pro X for the Mac but it’s awful. It hangs more than 50% of the time while it’s processing the scanned page and looks an out-dated application that hasn’t been updated for the Leopard operating system. I have recently downloaded ReadIris Pro which looks far more promising. The user interface is clean and straightforward, and it has scanned letters and newspaper cuttings into text and PDF files with 99% accuracy on text conversion.
• Eye TV 3 - This is a hardware add-on as much as a software application. I increased the multimedia versatility of my 24 inch iMac by buying an EyeTV Diversity TV tuner. This is a little device with a built-in USB plug that has two digital terrestrial TV tuners and two aerial sockets. It allows two TV channels to be watched or recorded onto the hard drive concurrently, and the excellent EyeTV 3 software allows live TV to be paused, and one-off or regular repeating programmes can be scheduled in advance for recording. Programmes are recorded in a proprietary .eyetv format but they can be exported to a variety of formats such as MPEG and AVI, and also to a portable device such as an iPod or iPhone, or burnt to a DVD-RW using Toast with a click of the mouse.

I have omitted from this list the applications that come bundled with the Leopard operating system. These include Mail, Apple’s email client that is comparable with Microsoft’s Outlook Express and perfectly usable; the Safari web browser that again is comparable with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (and which is available as a free download for Windows users); iPhoto, a neat repository for digital images; iCal, the calendar/diary application; Address Book which does what it says, Time Machine, the integrated backup application; iTunes, a repository for digital music with many nice features but that doesn’t permit me to organise my music tracks in the way that suits me.

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For a nervous Windows user considering whether to buy an Apple Mac for the first time, the knowledge that the Mac can run Windows is the biggest comfort of all. If all else fails and Apple’s Unix-based OS/X operating system proves to be impossible to live with, the beautiful hardware can be made to run Windows. It was certainly this knowledge that clinched my own decision, even though now, after 6 months with the Mac, I wouldn’t even contemplate going back to Windows.

The Mac can run Windows in one of two ways:

Firstly the Leopard operating system provides a utility call Boot Camp which allows the user to create a Windows partition on the Mac’s hard drive and at start-up choose whether to boot the Mac with Leopard or Windows. This way the Mac runs Windows natively so that Windows has access to all the Mac’s CPU and memory, the drawback being being that you must reboot to switch between Leopard and Windows. I believe that if you format the Windows partition as FAT32 you can read and write Windows files while running Leopard whereas if formatted as NTFS this will not be possible. Despite planning to use this Boot Camp facility before I bought the Mac I haven’t ever bothered to set it up, instead opting for virtualisation.

Secondly you can run PC emulation software under the Leopard operating system. I am aware of two main software products in this arena, Parallels (www.parallels.com) and VMWare Fusion (www.vmware.com). Both have good reviews and are reasonably cheap (as I type this Fusion is available for download for £43.99 or US $79.99). I opted for Fusion and have no regrets. I have set up two virtual machines, installed Windows XP Pro on one and Windows Vista Ultimate on the other. The setup process is simple and Fusion makes all resources of the Mac hardware available to Windows such as the built-in microphone, the speakers, the optical drive, the USB ports, as well of course as the screen and keyboard. You can run Windows in full-screen mode, in a Window on the Leopard desktop, or even run a single Windows application from the Leopard ‘dock’ as if it was a Mac application. Very clever. While the virtual PC is running it appears to the Mac as another networked device so files can easily be copied between the two computers. There is of course an overhead with this approach; using virtualisation some of the Mac’s resources are devoted not to Windows but to the emulation software and to the Leopard OS as well. Nevertheless with the Mac’s 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo processor it runs as a perfectly usable Windows PC on which I can happily run Visual Studio 2005.

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For almost twenty years I have earned my living developing software for Microsoft Windows using Microsoft tools. Therefore I arguably have some loyalty to Microsoft. However this doesn’t mean I blindly support every direction Microsoft moves in, or believe that its Windows operating systems are without flaws. I have used every version of Windows since version 3.0 in the early 1990s and every time a new Windows was launched Microsoft would promise that they’d really got it right this time, that this really was the one. Slowly I have become weary of this. Last year, my home PC running Windows XP service pack 2 started crashing for no particular reason. It wasn’t really a huge problem, more irritating than anything else. I could restart the computer and carry on. Then Outlook Express, the built-in email client I used, crashed and its database became corrupt. This was more serious. I had to revert to my last backup and consequently I lost a week’s emails. Not the end of the world, but very annoying. Despite having a powerful CPU and lots of memory the perceived speed of Windows declined. My task manager window showed dozens of processes that I didn’t recognise taking up valuable memory and processor time.

Then in August 2007 Apple launched the new iMac. It was beautiful. The white plastic of its predecessor had been replaced with light grey aluminium. The flat screen contained the complete computer; there was no separate box or even power supply. Everything, even the speakers, a webcam, and a Wi-Fi antenna, were hidden away inside that flat screen. I did a little research and discovered that thanks to Apple’s use of Intel processors it would even run Windows. Although a tiny minority compared with PC users, Apple Mac users seem generally to be fiercely loyal to their chosen computer. It’s almost impossible to find people who say the Mac is rubbish and Windows PCs are better. Sure there are lively debates about the comparative strengths and weaknesses of different features of the Mac operating system (known as OS/X - of which the latest version, 10.5, has been named Leopard) and Windows Vista, and this is healthy. Yet the attraction of buying a computer where the hardware and software were both developed by the same company to work together was compelling.

The iMac is available in two screen sizes: 20 inch and 24 inch. For me the attraction of the larger 24 inch display with a 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution was strong. I like to have several windows open at the same time. I can never have too much screen space available. This leads me to another Mac feature that sounded great and really does work: something called Spaces. This allows you to create a matrix of up to 16 virtual displays, each with different applications running on them, and flick between them with a quick keystroke or mouse click. You can even ‘zoom out’ to see all these virtual screens at once and drag windows between them. Curiously the only program I have experienced that can’t cope with this feature is Microsoft’s Office 2008 for the Mac which sometimes ‘forgets’ which virtual display it’s in and tries to escape to another. The photo on the left shows the zoomed out view of Spaces, and if you look carefully you can see that I’m running Microsoft Windows XP in one of those virtual displays!

In November 2007 I ordered my iMac with a fairly high specification: 24 inch screen, 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 duo CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 500GB serial ATA hard drive, and an 8x dual-layer DVD RW drive. There were no units with this specification in the country so I had to wait a fortnight while one was built and shipped to me from Shanghai, China. Ordering from the online Apple store wasn’t a pleasant experience. They took the money from my card immediately, before I even knew the lead time for delivery (by comparison if I remember correctly Dell don’t debit your card until they are about to ship the computer). Apple say, not unreasonably, that the computer will need to be signed for when it is delivered by the carrier but they cannot indicate the day, or even the week, in which delivery will occur, nor the carrier who will be delivering it. After a week I received a tracking number to trace delivery progress on the ANC website but this only shows historical milestones in the delivery process, not predictions about when delivery will occur. In my case when I consulted this two days before the ‘target’ delivery date I had been given I was shocked to see that the van driver had tried to deliver but had been unable to find our house so had returned the Mac to the depot. A telephone call to the depot encouraged the driver to try to find us again and in fairness to him although I had given Apple my full address when I ordered, the shipping label on the box omitted the first two lines of the address!

Having finally received the Mac I carefully unpacked the gorgeous machine. It is well packaged and even the keyboard, mouse, accessories and discs come in a pleasing carton. Sadly in my case the computer didn’t work. When switched on the screen was filled with shimmering horizontal lines. I repeatedly tried to restart it but to no avail. I phoned the helpline and after waiting in a queue for 45 minutes I was connected to a woman in Greece whose first language wasn’t English. She tried to talk me through a series of steps, including reinstalling the operating system, but the conclusion was that the Mac was dead and would need to be replaced. The Greek lady transferred my call to a man in Austin, Texas, USA who really couldn’t give a shit about the fact that I had paid £1,500 for a Mac that didn’t work. There was no apology or even a hint of regret. I wonder if this happens all the time. They would arrange to collect the useless Mac but wouldn’t even order me a replacement until the faulty Mac had been sent to Ireland for inspection and the nature of the fault had been checked. This might take a month or more he told me with delight.

The faulty Mac was collected within the week, and in due course I received an email that a new unit would be shipped from Shanghai. I was back in the same bind of not knowing when it would be delivered. Eventually it arrived and this time it worked!

The Leopard operating system does take a little getting used to for someone who has used Windows for so many years. Although there are many similarities between the two systems, there are sufficient differences to make every task slower. Personally I dislike the slim, flat keyboard with minimal key travel; I also dislike the so-called Mighty Mouse where the whole top of the mouse rocks to create left and right clicks, and I accidentally click the two buttons on the side of the mouse repeatedly. These can of course be changed, although to do so would slightly compromise the overall appearance of the desk. Worse though, is the different keystrokes for common tasks. Using Windows I frequently use the Ctrl+Z, X, C, and V for undo, cut, copy, and paste respectively. On the Mac these are Cmd+Z, X, C, and V. When editing a document the navigation keys above the arrow keys on the keyboard cause different behaviour from Windows. The keyboard is a U.S. layout so the @ sign is above the 2 while ” is above the ‘. These minor things can be relearnt but when I use a Windows PC at work all day it’s inevitable when I come home to the Mac that I repeatedly mistype.

On a more positive note the screen is an absolute delight. It is bright, crisp, and clear with accurate colour rendition. The sound from the internal stereo speakers set into the bottom edge of the screen is surprisingly good and quite acceptable for everyday personal listening. Of course it lacks bass but overall the quality is similar to separate speakers that we received with a mid-range Dell PC. The iMac is almost silent, the noise from its ventilation fan being a barely audible whisper. The first weeks using the Mac were of course a voyage of discovery. Yes I missed some features I had become used to in Windows, but invariably once I had learnt how to achieve the equivalent with Leopard I would be thinking how much better it was.

Conclusion after a few months of use: The buying experience wasn’t pleasant or professional. The response when I received a faulty Mac was very poor. However I’ve no regrets about switching to the Mac. There are a few niggles, it isn’t perfect, it has even crashed once or twice, but overall I now find myself enjoying using a computer more than I ever did with a Windows PC. It runs Windows when I need it (there are still just a few Windows applications that I use) but most of the time I use Leopard. I hope to post a description of the software I use on the Mac before too long.

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