Mac Eye a for a Windows Guy

Back in May I posted on my old blog, of how I had decided to switch to Mac and OSX from Windows. The urge to switch was mostly due to dis-satisfaction with the state of affairs in the Vista beta (i.e. more or less unusable at that stage), and the urge to try something new.

Since then I have taken delivery of a MacBook and I have now used it as my main machine ever since. So what are my experiences:

• The MacBook (mine is the white model) is an extremely sexy piece of hardware. That in itself makes the switch worth-wile.
• OSX is a really nice operating system – but it is just that; an OS. It is not a religion, it does not cure cancer – and I so wish the Mac fan-boys would remember that. Why I bring this up is that when you come in as a new user you tend to trawl the forums/newsgroups etc in search for help, tips and tricks, and so on, and I must say that quite a few Mac users come across as religious zealots, more so than for other OS:es.
• As I earn my living in the Windows space – doing research and training, quite a few of my colleagues assumed I was going to use BootCamp and dual boot. That is not the case, I am instead using Parallels and I run my Windows machines as VM’s. This works extremely well; when I bought the Mac I upped the memory to 2Gb and switched the hard drive to a faster 7200 rpm drive. This gives me plenty performance, and without having any benchmarks it feels that my VM’s run faster in my Mac than the VM’s I used under VMWare in my ThinkPad.
• On the host I have made an effort NOT running MS software – or locking myself in with Apple, so I use NeoOffice (based on OpenOffice) for my word-processing and spreadsheet needs, and Firefox and Thunderbird for browsing and email. It goes without saying that I also use Emacs.

So far it seems everything is just bliss, any negative things:

• Windows users tend to dislike the File Explorer in Windows. Compared to its OSX equivalent, (Finder ), File Explorer is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Finder is absolutely brain dead – for example; if I connect to a share on a remote server by mounting the share from the Terminal, the chances are pretty high that Finder won’t see the new volume (without having to re-launch Finder). Fortunately I have found a Finder replacement in Path Finder, an excellent piece of software.
• Above I mentioned that if I did it from the Terminal Finder had issues. This is another thing, it seems that when you use OSX you are supposed to do everything from the GUI: drag and drop, point and click. Understandable in one way as Apple was really the first GUI (apart from Xerox Parc), but still. OSX has a great underlying Unix core, but trying to get information how to do things using the Unix core from the Terminal is very hard to come by. Quite often the reply you get is that: “this is not the way you do it in a Mac …”. Well, excuse me but I thought Apple and Mac was all about having a choice.

Anyway, I am a happy camper using OSX, I’m looking forward to the up-coming Leopard release to see what that brings to the table. I haven’t had any chance yet to do any dev-work on OSX, but I’ll try to play around with Objective-C and Mono as well.