My weekly findings

After over a week using my new G5, I have come to a few conclusions:
Office 2004 for Mac is better than Office XP for Windows. In particular, I love Entourage (for email) far more than I ever liked Outlook. It searches more efficiently, and has a project management feature which I actually use. It also traps spam quite intelligently; I read in a MacWorld review that the algorithms have been greatly improved.
If I ever had to save one department in Microsoft, I’d choose the Macintosh developers.
Other points. Plug and play does well on a Mac, sometimes so subtly that I don’t even realise my new memory card or thumb drive has been detected. Of course, forcibly ripping out a device without ‘ejecting’ it prompts a similar warning that you get in Windows.
After many hiccups, third party music software is now working fine on the G5. Big thanks to my uncle for fixing that.
Sibelius is an amazing program for writing scores of your MIDI music. I haven’t tried it on a PC but obviously when you’re running on dual processors, everything is fast 😉 I like the idea of ‘score-as-you-play’.
I am also going with Logic (when I earn more money) because, as some of you say, it should work pretty well with its new owners, Apple.
On the minus side, I am not going to use iPhoto for organising my pictures, because it doesn’t respect or understand my deep hierarchies of folders.
iSync seems to work only with Apple’s own Address Book and iCal. I have to import contacts manually to Entourage. I really miss my Nokia PC Suite, because I was able to browse my phone’s directories, select all my snapshots and transfer them in bulk to my hard drive. iSync doens’t seem to be able to locate any files in my phone. There are probably too many different devices for Apple’s software to cater to.
The Bluetooth connection is working well enough, a little more consistently than the dongle on my old PC. I am quite impressed with my Apple wireless mouse and keyboard, although the battery level on my mouse has dipped to 3 out of 5 bars. I hope this isn’t going to be too costly to upkeep. I am nonetheless grateful that there are less wires to grapple with.
Writing my own music to CDs has been a breeze. I transfer what I play from my KORG keyboard, via my M-Audio card, to either GarageBand or Reason, and export the song to WAV/AIFF format.
If I use GarageBand, I can save it directly to iTunes, then either burn it on a CD-R or upload it to my iPod. It is all very neat.
My display, though now outdated in design, is holding up well. You gotta love Apple cinema displays. The only problem is finding wallpaper wide enough for 1680×1050.
Oh, what a tragedy.