iMac Musings

As of today, I have been an iMac owner for exactly a year - I bought a Core 2 Duo during the 2006 after-Thanksgiving Black Friday sale (online, from the comfort of a hotel room in West Atlantic City, NJ - no lining up at 2am for me!). I have to say that for the most part, I am pleased with this machine and its software. I honestly haven't used many of the applications and features it provides, but I do spend an awful lot of time sitting in front of it. Way too much time is spent surfing the Web using Safari. I really like using Mail to manage 4 e-mail addresses and iTunes for my digital music jukebox (one of these days I might actually own an iPod!). I have also installed PhotoShop for digital photo editing. I have played around with some of the other multimedia applications, but I really don't have much use for them, so have nothing significant to report.

My biggest disappointment with the iMac has been Safari. For the most part, it works; however, it has more incompatibilities than it should. I have come across a number of web sites that simply do not work correctly in Safari. Ironically, some of them have been Disney sites. With Steve Jobs sitting on the Walt Disney Company board of directors, you'd think that he might have some influence getting Disney to test its Web applications with Safari.

Since I am into digital photography, I did play around with iPhoto a bit. I was turned off by its insistence on organizing my photos for me, rather than honoring the directory structure I am used to using. There may be a way to turn that off, but I never took the time to figure that out. I do wish that IrfanView ran on OS X - it's a very simple way to quickly view photos within an existing directory structure, and to perform simple editing tasks. I have yet to find something comparable on the iMac. Any suggestions?