Starting Up Pt. 2 - What the Heck Am I Doing Here?

I've seen Safari before and other than the ability to resize form fields by dragging, I never cared for it and all my muscle memory for shortcuts is tied to Firefox, so I surf over to the site to download it and hit another oddity: I have no idea where stuff is being saved and how to install programs. What is this .DMG file extension? Where's the .EXEs?

I'm vaguely aware that Mac applications are tidier than Windows in their installation from stories when the iPod came out of people taking them to computer stores, connecting them to the display Macs - an iPod is nothing more than an portable hard drive with audio circuitry and an interface tacked on - and merely dragging copies of application suites like Microsoft Office to their drives and walking out. But how does it work in practice?

Clicking on the file sometimes opens a box that after a couple of times I realized that meant you could drag the icon over to install it to the Applications folder. The funky double-tap click-drag method of the trackpad makes it difficult at first, but I figure it out. Some apps require me to enter the system password I set in the beginning which begs a question: If the occasional click to allow Vista/Win7's UAC (User Account Control) to make system modifications was deemed so onerous that it prompted this mocking Mac ad, how come no one complains about having to type in a password here? What double standard?

I'm going to wrap this chapter up with what can only be called an INCREDIBLY STUPID DESIGN FLAW! The two USB and FireWire MiniDisplay ports are too close together! I put a normal-sized SanDisk Cruzer key drive and it's wide enough to block the adjacent ports. My Inspiron had 4 USB jacks stacked in pairs; my XPS has 3, with two stacked on one side and one alone on the other. The MBP is going to require a USB hub attachment to be fully usable. Wow.

Let's go to the tape!



Lovely.

I wrote my friend, "Nope, the form over function design has this row of jacks on the one side and that's it. You can put two USB CORDS - like a hard drive cable or MIDI keyboard, but not two key drives. My Dells' ports were stacked, not side-by-side, so I can get 3-4 (depending on which one) key drives in, not just one. Then again, this is the outfit that put a single USB port on the MacBook Air. WTF does someone with a wireless mouse do with their receiver dongle? I'm glad I have a Bluetooth mouse from my Dell which also had BT."