Reporting for Duty

After a few days with the new iMac things are starting to shape up. Among other things:

• Mail is working properly - I needed to designate a Junk mail folder for one of my accounts and now it is routing incoming mail as it should.
• Firefox needs a dictionary Add-on installed to enable spell checking. I didn't see a Klingon dictionary so I chose English.
• Boot Camp install was no problem, Windows XP is now running.
• I installed GIMP by downloading the distribution from Wilbur loves Apple. I didn't need to install any supporting packages, it just worked (Mac OS X 10.5.4). It even recognized .ARW raw files from my Sony camera.
• Microsoft Office 2008 is installed. I still need Excel and Word but I haven't played with the new Office interface much yet.
• For my Java development I installed Eclipse. Java and ant were pre-installed as was subversion - very nice. I know Apple is a little behind the curve on Java support but what there is works well so far for me.

About the only headache so far has been iTunes. After importing my mp3 collection I discovered that most of the files didn't have proper tag information. On Windows I relied on the directory structure and filename to identify the files but iTunes really needs the tags. Having a bunch of songs by Unknown Artist on Unknown Album is no fun. I looked at things like MusicBrainz and FixTunes but ended up rolling my own partial solution. I'm still wrestling with it but it is getting closer.

I will probably try hooking up some external speakers. The built-in iMac speakers are adequate for basic computing tasks but not very satisfying for music. The beat rolls on.