So, it’s been kinda quiet around here for a little while… As we have less than two weeks in our house (we settle next week), things are a little busy outside of work.
However, when we were in San Francisco, we both decided – given the sale of the house – to splash out on a little treat each:
A MacBook. (well, 2 of them)
Leonie has wanted a Mac for ages, and her old laptop is getting a little long in the tooth. I’ve not had a machine of my “own” for nearly 7 years (I’ve had work laptops), and as we are planning on travelling, we thought it was a good chance to get something new, as well as something small, light and portable.
So, down the Apple store we went. The first attempt was a failure – the guy started the spanish inquisition (“have you owned a mac before”, “do you know about X” etc), which really pissed me off, so we came back the next day and found a much more pleasant person to deal with.
15 mins – and about $6K NZ – later, and we have shiny new 2Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbooks with 2GB RAM in them. (and I found out today that these are 64bit as well! Nice!)
This is the first time I’ve used Mac OSX in anger, and so far, I’m loving it – even to the point where I have to correct myself on the PC, as some of the quick keys are different (copy/paste for example). It is similar to windows – especially vista – but it’s different enough to make me re-learn things, rather than just swearing at it when it doesn’t work. When I bought it, I thought at worst I’d have a nice, pretty, fast vista machine. I somehow dont think it’s going to come to that.
I was thinking about installing parallels on it, and working out of XP or Vista, as Phil (and I think Rod and Dave5) do for some things, but so far, for stuff outside of development, I’ve not needed to. Once I find a good RSS reader to replace FeedDemon, my personal stuff will be totally off the PC.
A few things are “not so good”, however:
- I’m used to a 15″ 1600×1200 screen, so going to a 13″ 1280×800 screen, things are cramped. That said, OSX is a lot better with less screen space than XP or vista, so it’s been less of an issue so far. Expose helps a lot. If I start coding on this machine, that may change – but it’ll run a 24″ external monitor, so I’m not too worried.
- I read RSS feeds in a very specific way – by group. FeedDemon, and SharpReader and SauceReader before it, do this very well (select the group, and it shows a “newspaper view” of all unread posts in that group). I can’t find a Mac reader which does the same – I’ve tried NewsFire so far, and am about to try NetNewsWire. Comments appreciated.
- I need to find a good bittorrent client. I’ve not looked yet. I mostly download from the server at home, but thats not going to be there after next week….
That’s it :) Very short list. So far, it’s just worked – talking to servers here at work, or at home, is seamless. I’m very impressed.
Next up, I’m going to either go back to my “roots” and develop some stuff with Java (via IntelliJ IDEA), or (and?) I’m going to take the time to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I dont have any reason – so far – to learn to develop native OSX apps, so I think I’ll skip that. It’s a bit of a pity that WPF and .NET 3.0 will not work natively on OSX, but I guess forcing me to learn something new is a good thing :)
