Today’s the first day using the MacBook Pro, and leaving the IBM at home. This now means that I’m working 100% on the MacBook, the backups are working, and I’ve got access to the applications I need. Some interesting notes on issues/niceties I’ve discovered so far…

Parallels: I’ve found Parallels to be excellent so far: along the same lines as VMware, it’s a virtual machine thingy so you can run a copy of Windows under OS X alongside your other Mac applications. There’s still the little matter that I have to deal with IE6 bugs, and I’ve still not found an OS X replacement for EMS MySQL Manager, so this is proving indispensable: on top of that I can configure some good sandbox justice, enabling me to see what sites look like in IE6, IE7, and under Linux as well as on the Mac itself. I really like how it puts icons for each Windows start-bar process on your Apple task bar too.

LogicExpress: I had a bit of fun with Logic Express last night. I’ve acquired a MidiSport 4×4 and connected it to the Minidisc mixing desk, with the aim of starting to convert the MD-Data masters from the Cheese Factory. After I’d got my head a bit more around how Logic processes things, I switched on MTC and managed to get it talking – woo! Sadly that was the point it went pear-shaped: Logic failed to record anything, crashed, and lost my session. Repeatedly. I think I’ll probably wait until I’ve got some peace and a few clear hours until I try it again 🙁

Palm Desktop: Calendaring is pretty important to me, and I’m very much ingrained in use of my Palm T|X. A killer app for me on Windows was their Palm Desktop product which pretty seamlessly integrates with the PDA itself, but I was quite annoyed to find that the OS X version wasn’t as mature as its Windows counterpart. Additionally, the version for download on Palm’s own site is 4.2.1, whereas my year-old installation CD has 4.2.2 on it! It’s a bit odd and crashes occasionally, and doesn’t have as many features as the Windows one; however it’s passable and beats iCal, which (for instance) doesn’t seem to retain categories properly.

That’s it so far. Probably more soon, but head’s a bit fuzzy right now thanks to the man-flu epidemic.