Randomize

It’s official, I’m a “switcher.” My Mac Pro is on the way (stock-issue to prevent customization delays). I watched Steve Jobs’ presentation and drank the Kool-aide, plus I’ve been running OS X 10.3 under PearPC for a few weeks and I’m pretty impressed (except, of course, with the speed of eumlating a PowerMac on my already-slow PC).

The fun part is that I’m not giving up anything I use regularly: - Mozilla Firefox - Mozilla Thunderbird - Photoshop CS2 - Bibble Pro 4.8 - IM (I’ll use Meebo, Fire, GAIM, iChat, or Adium) - Excel (I can use Office 2004 for Mac, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, etc.) - Monaco OPTIX - Terminal Services client

Oddly enough, only two of these (Monaco and Photoshop) do not also have equals on Linux, but I’m not a GIMP fan, and I don’t do photography without a fully color-managed workflow.

I’ve already begun rewriting the ASPX bits of my root web site in C# so they are friendly with Apache (comes with OSX) and mod_mono (which doesn’t but is apparently easy enough to configure). No more CPU pegs when Inktomi and Google bots come by, no more 5-connection limit.

Which brings up a good point: I’m still a dedicated .NET software developer. I’ll just be using mono at home and Microsoft.NET at work, which also forces me more into the C# camp than I am these days.

Stuff I am having to leave behind on the living room PC or run under Parallels: - SQL Server 2000 - I could convert my web site to MySQL, but I still need it for SourceGear Vault and testing projects from work, and I also make frequent use of uniqueidentifier data types and query constructs that MySQL lacks. - SourceGear Vault UI - I’m stuck with the command-line client under OS X. - Windows Media Player - I’m gonna find out really fast exactly which codecs for WMV work properly with Flip4Mac. - UltraEdit - time to find another text editor - SQL Query Analyzer - I will miss this tool. - dasBlog - I’m looking for mono/PHP-compatible alternatives (there’s a mod_mono port of dasBlog 1.4, but I don’t want to downgrade) - Access - I use it regularly to browser SQL Server databases. - Windows Picture and Fax Viewer - I really hope OS X’s equivalent is just as good or much better. - IE6 - which I only use for testing anyway - Orb - just when I got a phone that can handle it

Other things I’ll miss:

• Maximize. I usually run every app maximized, don’t know if I’ll be able to take the not-quite-expanded-enough windows in OS X.
• DOS. Yes, I’ve spent plenty of time in command shells on FreeBSD and Linux, but I’m very comfy in DOS.
• Parallel IDE. I’m going to have to replace a few drives to get my RAID 1 array in order again.
• Years of subconscious training for Windows keyboard shortcuts and mouse movements.
• Avoiding QuickTime.
• Remote Desktop access from anywhere. VNC just isn’t the same.

So, given the rate at which I’ve been blogging lately (busy at work, plus it’s a strong season for photography), my next post will probably be my Mac mini-review.