I must say I am really impressed. My wife totally loved the whole iMac remote thing when she views her pictures with it and I loved the interface of OSX. Although I’m still trying to get used to the whole thing (I can’t for the life of me maximize my windows and have no clue how to alt-tab between windows :p)
I also dual booted my iMac with Vista and I’m completly loving this machine! Vista looks REALLY good on the 20" widescreen and I’m starting to use it as my default machine.
Also got Visual Studio working and coding on a bright widescreen display rocks!
I’ve downloaded the demo of BioShock to put the machine through its paces. Needless to say, it ran smoothly with all details cranked up! Impressive for a mobility radeon card! The only thing is some textures are not appearing which I think might be a quirk with DX10 or the fact that the GPU can’t handle it. I’m still experimenting.
All in all, I’m pretty glad I got this thing! Really sexy machine!
Now, I’ve just installed the Unity demo and I hope I can create a couple of demos before my 30 day trial runs out. It’s pretty overwhelming at first, but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it.
Oh, and my Mighty Mouse found its way to the trash. Can’t stand using that thing.
You don’t wanna do that…I run Unity and Blender full-screen (these settings are remembered), and nothing else. Learn to use Exposé.
Cmd-`, or better yet, Exposé. In particular, set up the hot corners of the screen for that. A combo of Cmd-tab, Exposé, Cmd-H to hide apps, and drag’n’drop makes accessing everything really fast once you get used to it. Even if the Finder is lacking in some areas.
I’m surprised it ran Bioshock well given the massive critique the new iMacs have recieved over their underpowered video cards. What resolution did you run it on, and (approximately) what framerate did you get?
Maybe the architecture makes up for the relatively underpowered card?
Seriously, if you want to enjoy Bioshock then you should play it either on an Xbox360 or on a PC unless you don’t have a Mac Pro with a better gfx card. It runs on an iMac but really not compareable, at least on the one i’ve seen it.
Eric5h5: I have no idea what you just said But I’ll go home tonight and try to figure it out
dfvdan: I was surprised that Bioshock ran at all. But it did and I’m getting over 30fps at 1280x??? widescreen. It really is not that bad. Except for some disappearing textures that make the scene look really dark, the game was really playable! I’ll be testing some other DX10 demos and games and see what happens.
taumel: Yeah, but as long as I can play my games at over 30fps on my iMac, then I’m good! As for Bioshock, I’m telling you that I’m running the thing will all options cranked up at 1280x??? widescreen res and it still ran smoothly. Don’t ask me how or why, I’m just happy it does. So this also would mean that my other games should perform well.
I also got myself 2GB extra ram for a total of 3GB and my machine runs like silk Butterfly feelings everywhere!
AA isn’t working at the moment and believe me whatever fps you have it’s very likely to drop as you progress in the game (i’m talking of the game, not the demo) and the scenario will be more complex and hectic and filled with more eye candy.
And next stop will be Crysis, right?!
But i suspect that you’ll be able playing HL2 E2 on the iMac.
I disagree here. I think Windows has OS X beat in this department. It’s nice to save space by not having a separate menu bar for every application, unless you want to run two monitors, which I do. If you are working on the screen without the OS X menu bar, you have to go all the way to the top of the other screen to access menu commands. Granted, I use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible, but some commands just don’t have one (e.g. “Clear History” in Safari).
Another thing that is really annoying is that when clicking in an application’s panel to make it active, when it would be the most convenient to click at the top, I always end up moving the whole window, and then need to reposition it. (I use a Wacom 6x11 tablet and even Wacom will tell you that you can’t keep your pen still on these due to design flaws.) I run Unity, Logic, and whatever 3D program I am using, in full screen, and a “real” maximize feature would be nice for these.
expose is awesome - especially for game dev work when you’ve got tons of windows open. go to system prefs (the lightswitch-apple icon in the dock), click on dashboard expose. i personally have it set up where the lower left corner of my screen shows all windows, lower right dashboard upper right the desktop.
you’ll never think of alt-tab again. btw congratas on your purchase have fun with unity ; )
Congrats on the iPurchase. Good move. Tossing the Mighty Mouse was a good idea too! As for the alt-tab, its simple… command-tab is the same thing. However I never use that on the mac, instead I use the expose ‘all windows’ feature… F9. In fact I use it so much that I assigned it to the third button on my logitech mouse… you should try it.
If you like using Visual Studio (I do too) then i suggest you download the evaluation version of VMware for the mac (its called Vmware Fusion) and run XP in it. That will allow you to run XP and OS X at the same time and make it very easy to use Visual Studio as the code editor for Unity. If you search the forums you will find instructions on how to do this.
There’s no doubt about it, Expose is a great feature. However, it shouldn’t come at the expense of other useful features. If you’re always using a mouse, Expose is fantastic.
However, If you are always shifting yourself between a musical keyboard, a drum controller, a guitar, a bass, a microphone, a 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator, the laptop keyboard, the trackpad, and a Wacom tablet (with an external monitor to the right of the laptop), like me, then the more you can do with any one input device, the better.
When I’m using the MIDI controllers, I tend to use only my right hand to access keyboard shortcuts, as the controllers are situated to my left. The more you can do with the shortcuts, the better, as far as I’m concerned. And gigantic (fullscreen) windows are great when you’re looking at them from afar, say, for reading music. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite happy with the navigational abilities of OS X overall, but there’s no reason everyone should be forced to go with only one method, when other good alternatives have existed long enough for Apple to incorporate and improve them.
Well, actually … that’s the Apple design philosophy. Pick one way to do something and do it well. Please 80% of your users and tell the remaining 20% to buck up (which they are fully capable of doing).
IMO, this is part of the problem with Windows. It tries to be everything to everyone and that clutters a lot of it’s interfaces. Toolbars are crazy in most Windows apps because of this.
I don’t always love the choices that Apple devs make but I can always respect the fact that they are keeping their interfaces uncluttered and easy to use.
Bioshock is selling! I’m really happy that they are doing fine after having no commercial success with pearls like Sytem Shock and Sytem Shock 2 in earlier days. Looking Glass/Irrational Games were/are really a benefit for the gaming world contrary to so many others.
Just read that the 20inch iMac comes with a 18bit display only. If that’s true this explains some of the things why it’s looking worse, than the 24inch model.
But I’ll go home tonight and try to figure it out