Moving to the Mac

So, it’s been over a month now that I have had my new MacBookPro. I have spent the last month or so getting everything up and running. I have had to purchase a couple products. But right now it seems that everything is where I need it to be.

Office

I had to purchase Microsoft Office. This is the first time I have ever had to purchase Office. I have a MSDN license, so on Windows, I always used that copy of the application. Office on the Mac is rather nice, and feels like a Microsoft product. Word and Powerpoint have crashed on me several times, and that made me feel like I was back on my PC. At first I hoped to be able to use iWork from Apple, but there really are features in Office that I need. I also had couldn’t purchase the Home version of office, as I wanted to use Automator actions. I’m a bit upset that there are so many different versions of office for the Mac. It seems that Microsoft likes to diversify their product line to the point of loosing focus.**

Blogging

I have had to do all my blogging in ecto. The application is a good replacement for the blogging tools I have on the PC, but it still isn’t as good as Microsoft’s blogging tool. On the bright side, the application is still being developed and the short coming of the application can be fixed. I have owned it now for about a month and there have been several updates in that month.

RSS/NewsReader

I have been using NetNewsWire as my RSS reader. I like the application, but I miss several of the features that I loved in FeedDemon. On FeedDemon I use to set up the folder view to display all folders that had unread items in them. The view would be set up to display only unread items, and I would scan feed by feed using the control-d to mark the displayed page as read and move to the next unread section. If I came across anything that looked interesting I would flag it and put it in a bucket to turn into another RSS feed, that I run through Feedburner and import into my personalized home page, and onto my Blog. I can’t seem to reproduce this workflow exactly, but I’m getting there.

Graphics

I need to get my license of Creative Suite 3 Professional transfered off my PC and onto this Mac. I have not yet done this.**

Development Tools

Well, I purchased this computer to do iPhone development. I will have to say that the customer service I have gotten from Apple vs. the customer experience I got from Microsoft is like day vs. night. I was personally contacted by someone at Apple and they wanted to help me with the process of getting my keys. I had already gotten most of this done, but the personal phone call from someone who sounded like he was calling me from the Bay Area was nice.

As for web development tools, I have tried Coda and BBedit. I have yet to land on a product that I like. I want something that integrates with Subversion or CVS.

Other Cool Tools

iCalendar + SpanningSync +iPhone + iTunes = EPIC WIN! I finally have everything all synced up. On the PC this was almost impossible. I tried to get Vista’s calendar, and Outlook, and some syncing tools and iTunes all to work together. It was frustrating. It was doable outside of firewalls and proxy servers, but once you get behind a proxy server the whole workflow fell apart. This one workflow alone was worth the price of admission. I’m also looking forward to getting OmniFocus and Remember the Milk setup.

BootCamp

I installed BootCamp to do Vista. I have yet to use Vista, but I can see that I I will after I get the wireless card I have up and running under Vista (btw, getting it up and running on OSX was as simple as downloading the driver and following the instructions on installing it. It just worked.) I will probably use Vista for gaming only. Sadly I’m now thinking that all Vista is good for is games. It’s my new toy operating system.

Overall Impressions

The next computer my Mom and Dad get will be an iMac. I’m also going to make my sister get one as well. I’m tired of doing tech support on PC’s. I spent several weeks getting rid of viruses on their machines over the last year. Also it seems that everything Just Works on the Mac. I guess you can say that I drank the Kool Aid and It’s GREAT!