MacBook Pro, week 2

I'm definitely getting more used to the MacBook. I find myself trying to do Option + down arrow to page down when I'm on my PC :) I still struggle with some of the trackpad gestures, but it's getting easier.

I do still find the trackpad "button" to be really annoying. Basically, the entire trackpad is one big button that you can click -- unlike PCs, which generally have one or two separate buttons underneath the trackpad. This isn't really intuitive and I actually thought the trackpad was broken for the first 10-15 minutes that I used the Mac. Now that I know about it, it's straightforward enough, but I find the "button" to be hard to push. A lot of times on my PC, I push the buttons with one of my thumbs, but I don't have quite enough strength to do that easily on the MacBook. So I have to do it with one of my fingers, and sometimes the effort it takes to push the button down causes my finger to slide on the trackpad and move the cursor.

Since I use my PC for work, I end up using the MacBook like a "normal" user, i.e. a non-geek. I spend probably 90% of my time in a web browser. Safari is an OK browser. I have had a few sites that don't show up right in it, but then, the same holds true of IE10 on my Windows 8 PC.

I also tried out iPhoto when we were out of town last weekend. I was pleased to find that the MacBook has a slot for an SD card, so I can pull the card out of my camera and plug it right in to download pictures. (My main PC has this feature as well, and it is really convenient.) It was easy enough to import my pictures into iPhoto. Then I wanted to upload one to a Facebook group that I'm part of… and that's where I ran into issues. iPhoto offers the option to upload to Facebook, but only to my main news feed. And when I went to browse the disk for my imported photos, I couldn't find them anywhere! They were visible in iPhoto, so I knew they were somewhere… but where? Double clicking on "iPhoto Library" in Finder (which appears to be similar to Explorer) simply launched iPhoto.

I asked a friend and she told me to right click on iPhoto Library and choose "Show Package Contents." Um, not real intuitive, but OK.

That got me into a folder structure where I was able to drill down and find the picture I was looking for. (I grabbed it out of the "Masters" folder, in case you're wondering.)

Then I copied it into a different folder, so it would be accessible in Safari when I went to upload it to Facebook. And finally, I was able to upload.

Easy? Ummm… when I import pictures using Windows Live Photo Gallery on my PC (or even the built-in Windows importer), they go straight to my Pictures library and I can easily find them through IE and upload them. That is easy.