Wednesday 10 September 2008

Bootcamp Eases the Migration

I'm taking the plunge and going fully Mac-native, and I have to say, boot camp is really helping make the transition doable - I wonder if this was part of the strategy in the first place?

I like the hardware. It looks nice, feels nice, and you're assured of a fairly good build quality. I like the robustness of the platform, and the no-brainer compatibility (anything apple just works with anything apple in my experience), although the significantly smaller software library is a drawback, albeit a steadily reducing one.

I'm not new to Macs, I've pretty much always had a PC, a Mac, and an experimental-frankenstein-exotic-flavors-of-Linux machine (usually my current PC minus 1) concurrently. I've just never actually done anything of much significance with the Mac - it's been pretty much iTunes and web browsing territory for me.

Now that I've decided to switch my use of Mac and Windows so that I'm using the apple as a primary machine, I have to work out how I'm going to be able to do any work. My problem isn't knowing my way around OSX, it's all the little applications, tools and utilities for the things I do every day that's the issue. The best way to get to grips with something is to do it, but sometimes the stuff I have to do won't wait until I find out what the Mac version of EA or Visio is, or feel my way around a new IDE. In these circumstances, is really handy to have the backup of being able to reboot into Windows, get the urgent task done in the familiar environment, and then go back to Mac - without lugging 2 notebooks around. For example, this post was brought to you by MarsEdit, and I was formerly a Windows Live Writer man...

Actually, an 'equivalency' site would be an awesome idea - something like a "this on Mac is like that on Windows" to make it easier for more people to make the switch. If anyone knows of such a thing out there, drop me a link.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or, programmer versus developer where programmer write code and developer builds solutions.
There are engineers in so many directions. And been software engineer is not as been a hardware engineer. So IT systems engineer. What about analysts, architects, project managers…They all build solutions. It’s heavy to hide “facum-totum” peoples under the engineer title. These people are more, much more. Or not?

Unknown said...

hi anonymous - thanks for the comment but I suspect it might be against the wrong post; I guess you might have been referring to this post:

http://www.eachan.com/2008/09/don-be-developer-be-engineer.html

If so then yes, all the titles you mentioned all build solutions and that's my point! No matter what part of IT you're in, you solve problems with technical solutions, you don't just mindlessly execute task X against system Y...