Comments on: Tales of a Switcher: Josh Gets a Mac

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:56:46 +0000

Thank You

By: No1UKnow

No1UKnow — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:19:29 +0000

Ahh but you don’t have to leave Windows behind or even go total Mac….

Checkout Synergy

Now you can use your Mac on your PC….
Or you PC on your Mac….

Keep the old keyboard and mouse and throw away that one clicker garbage…

By: Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 19:23:58 +0000

Thud, it's possible to move a Flex Builder license from Windows to Mac. See the Flex FAQ for more information. I don't know about other products, though. You may be able to learn more by contacting Adobe. Personally, with the release of CS3 this spring offering an update to almost everything I use, I don't mind repurchasing the products I need.

By: Thud

Thud — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:29:23 +0000

I’m eager to switch myself, but don’t relish paying full price for Adobe and Macromedia products again — did you repurchase everything, or did they offer a cross-platform upgrade? As it is, I feel locked into Windows.

By: Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 16:33:35 +0000

Ralph, Flex Builder seems to build pretty fast. I haven’t encountered the CPU-hogging builds that plagued me on Windows. This could be because my old PC doesn’t have a dual core processor, or the recent transition to 2.0.1., or it could be that Eclipse and/or Java simply runs smoother on Macs.

I haven’t tried Flash Authoring on the Mac yet. Word on the street is that Flash 8 is slow running through emulation on Rosetta. I’m waiting for Blaze.

By: Ralph

Ralph — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 10:12:36 +0000

How would you say it measures up in terms of Flex and Flash building? Miss anything ? Feels faster/slower? That’d be my main concern; and the only reason of insecurity as to the why I haven’t bought a Mac yet.

By: MOLOKO

MOLOKO — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 13:47:39 +0000

I also switched about a year ago and have mostly found using a mac plain sailing, and in some ways much better than using a PC (not having to bother with AV software, having a proper command line, exposÃ©)
Agree with most of what you said, esp. Home and End behaviour. What’s really annoying is that in some programs (e.g. Dreamweaver) Home and End behave as they do on Windows which is just really confusing!
Other things that I think are a bit frustrating are a) that you can only re-size a window from the bottom right-hand corner b) that you can’t cut and paste files in Finder (in fact Finder is pretty awful generally – PathFinder is an improvement but you have to pay for it) and c) that there seems to be no keyboard shortcut for maximising a window that you’ve minimised to the Dock – get used to using APPLE-H to hide windows instead.
A couple of other things I’ve found really useful are the ability to flash the screen when an alert event happens (System Prefs, Universal Access, Hearing, Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs) as then your screen will briefly flash white when, for example, new mail arrives; and the ability to get the mac to speak alerts (System Prefs, speech, Text to Speech, Announce when alerts are displayed) as then you can set something running, leave your speakers switched on a go off an do something else – if there’s a problem your mac will say ‘Excuse me’ and then read you the alert text!
The zoom feature is also really nice – hold down CTRL and scroll the mousewheel – the entire screen will zoom in!
BTW, am pretty sure you use BACKSPACE to delete an email in Thunderbird on OS X.

By: Frank Manno

Frank Manno — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 22:38:45 +0000

Congrats on the switch Josh!

I made the same move about 3yrs ago and I haven’t looked back. It’s a treat everyday working with this platform.

My girlfriend has the new Mac Books, and Parallels is definitely a feature I miss on my PowerBook… especially when debugging CSS on IE. If you haven’t already, you should look into setting up “Coherence” in Parallels. It lets you run Windows and Mac apps side by side (without having to run Windows apps in a “virtual machine container”).

If you need any tips or are looking for a Windows equivalent to something, don’t hesitate to email me. It can be a little overwhelming at first… but you’ll soon find yourself wondering why you didn’t switch sooner.

Good luck!

By: Campbell

Campbell — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 09:27:51 +0000

Wow I have often thought about making the switch but Im not really ready to make the Jump. I would leave the security of the .NET framework :o( but seeing parallel in action is very promising.. :o)

By: Tink

Tink — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 15:05:07 +0000

Quicksilver is worth getting http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
VirtueDesktops can also come in useful (especially if your running Parellels and you only have the one screen) http://virtuedesktops.info/
MAMP you might be interested in too http://www.mamp.info/en/index.php
Desktopple is also useful for hiding those things on the desktop that people aren’t meant to see http://foggynoggin.com/desktopple
TNEF is useful if your using MAil and get a load of winmail.dat attachments http://tnef.sourceforge.net/