The Mac

I've always liked PCs more than Macs. Main reason is that I'm a programmer. I write programs and historically, there've always been more programming languages tools and more access to the machine for the PC.

What's interesting in the last month and a half for my new job, I've been using a Macbook Pro. At first, I hated it. I couldn't get used to the different keyboard layout for something simple as the control key. I also had to get used to the bash shell as opposed to 4nt. Of course, since I'm using this for work, there's the usual Microsoft Office applications. There's also Eclipse so that I can do PHP and Java programming.

I have to learn Mac, Cocoa, XCode, iPhone, and iPad programming. Lots of fun ahead of me.

One of the main thing I've missed from the PC world is SlickEdit. That's a great editor and for a programmer, there isn't a more essential tool. After the OS, everyone has an opinion for the editor. I tried SlickEdit for the Mac, but SlickEdit is an X11 application and feels second class. I would have loved to find something compatible, but after searching for Brief on a Mac, I finally gave up. I decided to switch. I'm currently trying out TextMate. We'll see how that works.

One thing I realized is that as good as the Mac is for content creation, it is still a Unix box underneath it all. It is the first really good usable Unix desktop. Most users don't realize they're using a Unix box. I'm also quite surprised that after installing a bunch of stuff, I'm using only 90GB! On my Windows 7 box in comparison, after installing just the base OS, 15GB was already used up. After installing my applications, dev tools, 200GB was used. It isn't a fair comparison, I know.