I’ve had an iMac for a almost 3 months now and I’m really pleased with it. I’ve gone totally non-Microsoft so am using Open Office instead of MS Office and have no problems dealing with the rest of the world that uses Microsoft products.

I think the most impressive thing with the iMac happened yesterday. I bought a second monitor (support is built in; the only negative: you have to buy an Apple converter cable to go from their non-standard mini-DVI to regular DVI) and plugged it in. Not only did it just work, it even guessed correctly that the new monitor was on the right of the iMac and the mouse moved smoothly from one screen to the other. But the best part: the second monitor (a Hyundai W240D) can pivot from landscape to portrait mode. The iMac display preference popped up (one on each monitor) and gave me a choice of rotation (every 90 degrees). When I set it to 90 and rotated the monitor it again just worked. I was blown away.

Now, it’s not perfect. Firefox menus and subwindows on the second monitor appear at the right side of the iMac monitor but that’s not hard to deal with since the mouse movements between monitors are so smooth.

I like the Mac OS integration between applications and am getting used to window controls being on the other side of the window and the single menu bar that may be far from the windows it controls. Overall it has been a smooth transition. I’ve been recording my observations about the differences between Mac OS and Windows on a new blog.