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I've Recently Converted to a Mac and Loving It

A few months ago I made the plunge and bought a MBP. I've been slowly converting over my apps and configurations from my PC to my Mac (learning as I go) and couldn't be happier.

I'm so pleased with it that I've been preaching to family members to get one for their next computer upgrade. I even bought a new iMac this weekend for the new family computer at home (waited until Leopard was released).

I decided to upgrade my MBP to Leopard (knowing full well that CF8 is not yet fully supported (I still have my PC laptop here as well and all of my projects are in SVN, so its not a big deal to use that until a CF8 patch is out or I decide to use a workaround (see comments on that page)).

I have several programs that don't quite work correctly (but I researched them before upgrading, so I'm not surprised and can live with them as-is until they are updated).

My overall impression so far is that I'm very pleased:

  • Spaces is excellent. Sure I've used similar mutli-desktop programs for the PC since the late 90's, but its nice to have something like this built into the OS and officially supported.
  • Time Machine works great (although I have a feeling I may still do nightly image backups on my NAS until I've done enough testing to make sure Time Machine is backing up everything (ie. my Apache configs, etc).
  • And Boot Camp runs great (I was already using the Beta, so I only needed to update the drivers in Windows) and also loads well from VMWare Fusion (note: If using VMware Fusion 1.0, there is a new release of 1.1 Beta to support Leopard. Just keep in mind that its beta (although its working great for me so far)).

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Comments (Comment Moderation is enabled. Your comment will not appear until approved.)
Jose's Gravatar How timely... I've been a CF developer for 5+ years running a PC and in the next day or two I'm going to order the 17" MBP. If you don't mind, can you share your development environment on this new MBP? I assume you're running Eclipse? For BootCamp, did you end buying another copy of XP/Vista? I need to run Enterprise Manager to manage dbs so I'm afraid I have to convince my boss to shell out extra $$ for the Win OS. Any other "development related" insights would be much appreciated.
#1 by Jose | 10/30/07 9:33 AM
Jeff Coughlin's Gravatar @Jose: To be honest I could probably fill several blog posts on all my experiences converting from PC to Mac and setting things up the way I wanted (btw: I got CF8 running about 30min after I posted this blog post. Just needed to recompile the correct .so file (thanks to ScottP for that)).

To answer your immediate questions: Yes, I am using Eclipse (with CFEclipse). I have both VMWare Fusion and Parallels and at the moment prefer VMWare Fusion. Using Boot Camp allows me to use either program to mount the partition in OS X (however, I seem to be getting smoother results if I don't use Boot Camp and just create an OS image).

I have a licensed copies of Vista, XP, and Win2k3. Any of those will run in VMWare and will also run MSSQL 2005 (although in my experiences so far Vista seems to be a resource hog just idling). VMWare Fusion also supports those in 32bit and 64bit on your Mac (assuming you have a Mac intel 64bit... if you're about to buy one, then yes it will be 64bit). If you plan to play video games at all, I suggest XP. For me I'm running Win2k3 64bit and it runs very smooth (no lag accessing the DB). I have 4GBRam on my MBP (bought the ram from Mushkin (note: its much cheaper to buy RAM elsewhere and does not Appel told me its the one hardware piece I'm allowed to upgrade without voiding warrantee)) and dedicate 1GB to the Win2k3 image (probably overkill for my needs).
#2 by Jeff Coughlin | 10/30/07 9:47 AM
Tunç's Gravatar Hi Jeff,

I am using MBP with VMware too. I managed to install CF 8 with built in-webserver. I tried with Apache as well. It installed but i never managed to get it running. I was wondering what setup you used?

Kind regards

Tunç
#3 by Tunç | 11/12/07 6:19 AM
Daryl James's Gravatar Jeff,
I just switched over myself. As a freelancer, many of my resources are now "in the clouds", and platform independent, so I decided to go with the higher quality hardware.
Like you, I'm loving the switch and have become a Mac evangelist. From the little things like a magnetic powercord to the backlit keyboard, to the big things like durability and design, Mac is clearly superior (IMHO).
#4 by Daryl James | 1/9/09 11:31 AM



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