Upgrades

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm now working on a new laptop. My old MacBook was at least 10 years old, and was reaching the point where I wouldn't be able to keep up with software updates.

With a birthday coming up, and many previous years of not wanting anything in the way of gifts, it was an opportunity to splash out.

So I'm now getting to grips with the move.

I've generally found Mac upgrades to be fairly painless. Unlike Microsoft, which treats every Windows upgrade as an opportunity to show off how cool and geeky the Microsoft propellorheads are, and force millions of poor users in the real world to completely re-learn everything from the ground up, Apple doesn't mess much with the user interface. There may be new or updated features, but you can pretty much rely on finding things tomorrow in the same place they were yesterday.

The single most significant change this time was entirely self-inflicted – a switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. This switch is a bit of a learning curve. In many ways, OpenOffice Writer and Calc look a lot like MS Word and Excel. Much of the look and feel is similar, but the overall sense of familiarity hides a wealth of smaller differences, which I'm still learning. Sometimes it takes a bit of online research to find out how to do things, but I have to say that – so far – I haven't found anything I used to do in MS Office that I can't do in OpenOffice.

And one huge sigh of relief – OpenOffice is blisteringly fast.

When I write a novel, I break out the manuscript into anywhere between 9 and 12 separate documents. These typically run to 10k or 15k words. I've always found that Word takes quite a while to open a document this size, and it's got worse over the years with various “improvements”. The most frustrating behavior that cropped up at the last big upgrade was that it would only seem to load the first few pages and then stop until I tried to scroll down, then it would realize there was more to follow and load some more. I would drag the scroll bar down only to find I was only a few pages in, and the scroll bar would jerk and shrink as more got tagged on to the end. For documents the size I deal in, I had to force the scroll bar all the way down again and again until I was sure I had the full text. This could take a minute or so on a really large document, like when I pack the whole manuscript into one file for publication.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I went into OpenOffice and opened the full text of The Long Dark – over 100k words, 200 pages. It was all there in under 2 seconds. No messing around.

So, I'm now up and running, and learning as I go. It took many long hours last week to copy files over, especially my locally-stored mailboxes because the export/import feature didn't work as advertised. The one thing I still haven't yet solved is how to move my photos library. I've tried several approaches which should in theory have worked, but none of them so far have managed to copy that single 18GB file. So, that is still a work in progress.

P.S. Just discovered another benefit – I can copy/paste from my document straight into Blogger's text window without accidentally including a load of MS Word hidden crap, and it carried over italics as well!