I’ve been using Macs for about two months now, an iMac for work and a MacBook for play everything else. The MacBook is great—I not only have no complaints; I have not one thing that I miss from Windows…and a list of things I’d miss like crazy if I had to go back to Windows.

The iMac on the other hand…. It’s not the iMac’s fault. If I were using the iMac the same way I’m using the MacBook, I’d love it. But I use it for the day job, and there are some shortcomings there.

The biggest problem is that some of the things I do require IE 6 or later—Safari, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0 beta, Opera: none of these handle what I’ve gotta do. So I have Windows (Vista!—what was I thinking?) running on VMFusion on the iMac, just so I can use IE for a half hour a day. (And there might actually be an issue with a site I need to work with once a month that won’t even work with that solution—it did the first time, but subsequent uses just didn’t happen; I ended up booting up the Compaq desktop to get it taken care of last month. We’ll see how it goes this month.)

Next biggest annoyance: in Windows, when using the lastest few versions of Dreamweaver, if you copy text from a webpage that includes a hyperlink, the link automatically comes along for the ride. I got really used to that highly time-saving feature. Combine Leopard with Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 and I feel like I’m back in the dark ages. So…I run Dreamweaver in Windows through VMFusion at least once a week, just for the convenience.

Then there’s Spaces. Awesome concept, buggy implementation. I ended up disabling it because it kept “disappearing” files I was working on. Say I’m using Word in Space 2 and I go over to InDesign in Space 3 for a few minutes. When I come back to Space 2, Word is still there, but my document isn’t. The document is still open; I just can’t see it. I found that there were two tricks I could use to bring it back: go to View|Full Screen (which wouldn’t actually implement full screen; it’d just bring my document back) or go to Window|New Window. This happened with Word, Dreamweaver, InDesign…anything that had a window that could be disappeared, disappeared it.

Last complaint: I used EditPad Pro on Windows as my text editor, and the best thing about that program was the mulitline find-and-replace. I’ll often receive a press release that has an unordered list in it. When I paste the release into the text editor, I need to remove whatever character they used in the press release as a bullet and insert a blank line between each item—this makes my life easier when I turn around and upload the release to the website. I reformat bulletted lists in EditPad Pro in seconds. I’m not seeing multiline find-and-replace in Smultron or xPad. So I have to use Word…. But I’d prefer to use a nice, small text editor.

There is a lot, however, about using the iMac for work that I do like. Connecting to my iMac using Screen Sharing over the Internet is the bomb. You’ll have to pry Time Machine from my cold, dead hands. Screen capping is love. Mail has a lot of great features. Both waking up from sleep and reconnecting to the network is superfast—I never find myself debating the pros of energy conservation against the cons of waiting for ages for the computer to wake up and connect (if it woke up at all).

I’m having one issue with both Macs that has nothing to do with the Macs. The Creative Zen Vision M Mark gave me isn’t Mac compatible, so I have to use this third-party software that sometimes takes several tries to connect and sometimes transfers multiple copies of songs onto the device. It’s irritating. I’m going to replace it with a Mac-compatible device eventually.