Switching to a Mac has been a bittersweet experience so far.
Sweet, because:
- I love my crisp wide-screen display – how all connections are consolidated into one cable which I plug into my G5, which is neat.
- The G5 is so quiet, you hardly realise it’s on.
- Mac-compatible hardware and software programs are really easy to set up and uninstall. I’m still not used to dumping an application in the Trash folder – it’s almost surreal.
- My computer talks to me.
- Everything looks so good, dammit… what more can I say?
Bitter, because:
- The rest of the world hasn’t quite caught up yet. Meaning that I can’t access some applications and services properly.
My case in point today is the Citibank (Singapore) website. When I use their recommended browser for OS X, which happens to be Netscape 7, I can’t get past the login page due to some silly Applet not loading. I tried every other browser in my collection (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Camino, Opera) and none of them were able to get past the login page. All have Java enabled. The Mac Operating system already has Java installed. Am I missing out on something here?
I did have more success with Safari, which lets me do everything except view my statements in PDF form. Since I decided to go paperless a long time ago, being able to download my statements this way is of great importance to me.
Citibank has in fact been encouraging customers to switch from paper to electronic statements. I hope they respond to the technical support request I filed, with a working solution.
Comments
plug this – PDF Browser plugin and you can view the PDF statements from Citibank using Safari.
I guess there’s not enough voices to make a loud and strong statement to the financial institutions other browsers exist besides IE. I don’t have a G5, but I’m wondering if the grills on the airflow in-take side will get dusty in the long run.
Jim – Thanks, I will check this out.
Albert – yes it gets dusty, because I took a look inside an old display at Apple Ikea.
However, because of the way the components are laid out in modules, it is very easy to detach and clean. I had never in my life dismantled a CPU before, but managed to insert a new sound card into my G5 without much problems.
Singaporean weblogs roundup.
Otterman writes on the upcoming film, Cages, “a Singapore-US feature film that aims to raise awareness of the handicapped in Singapore.” He also links to an interesting piece on Toronto’s Bicycle/Motor-Vehicle Collision Study.
Vanessa posts on th…
Try Netscape 7.02 for OS X. It works for DBS and Citibank. I was having trouble with these two banks until I downloaded 7.02. It was such a pain to read the fine print of the DBS site to see that only 7.02 was supported on the Mac (even my wife’s Netscape 7.01 on iBook did not work).
Hope this helps.