Goodbye PC, Hello Mac

30 Aug 2007

As the title says, work has replaced my previous Dell Lattitude D620 with a new 15.4" MacBook Pro.

I’ve only had the MBP for a couple days now so I’m still getting used to OS X.  There’s a lot more to learn but my two day impressions are positive.  Even the girlfriend likes it (she’s wanted a Mac for awhile now).

I’ve been using Linux for the past 12 or 13 years so I appreciate the ease with which I can open Terminal.app and run the basic gnu tools.  All I need now is a nice multi-tab’d terminal application (a quick Google search brought up iTerm, which looks promising).

The past couple of years have been spent developing Java applications in Windows.  I used Cygwin extensively and honestly it was pretty good.  The JavaVM’s (Sun’s primarily although I usually used JRockit) seemed a bit more optimized for Windows and the application server started/restarted significantly faster.  Not the ideal benchmark but an important one given how much time we all spend doing deployments.  I should note that JRockit on Linux did perform faster in this regard than Sun did.

I’ve switched from using BlogDesk to Qumana for blog composition. It was interesting to see that Qumana is actually developed in Vancouver, BC. 

World of Warcraft installed without a hitch.

Quicksilver (and Spotlight to a lesser degree) provide a suitable replacement for the functionality that I was using Google Desktop for.  Namely, the ability to easily launch applications.

I don’t compose a lot of documents so I don’t think Microsoft Office will be a significant loss.  I’ve got NeoOffice installed but may decide to use Google Docs instead.

I’ve been on vacation for the past couple weeks so I haven’t had an opportunity to do any actual development on the new machine.  That being said, I was able to get my development environment setup without too much of a problem.  Fortunately some kind soul has made PostgreSQL binaries available.  IntelliJ IDEA seems to work equally well in OS X as it did in Windows.  The only downside from a Java perspective is Apple dragging it’s feet around support for Java6.  We haven’t migrated to it yet but Mac support is the gating factor.

That’s all I have to say for now.  It seems like a good platform for daily development and overall general usage.