I’d been intending to do it all along: the arrival of the MacBook Pro had simply speeded the process up, but for about 6 months I’ve been gradually leaning towards having a Mac as my principal desktop.
This isn’t a thing to be taken lightly. I’m a contractor and as I’ve said a lot, I need to hit the ground running. Sometimes I’ll have less than 4 weeks to do a task that should be scheduled for 6 months, and so I need to be exceedingly confident using the tools of the trade – namely, my computer. So it was with a little bit of anxiety that I finally decided to try and use the MacBook in work, properly, and without needing to use the T42p.
How did it go? Well, day #1 was pretty good. I’d installed most of what I thought I might need – stuff like Zend Studio and Photoshop as well as staples such as Firefox. I only really need ssh on top of that lot and I’m fine.
Thanks to Macports I’ve got the MacBook set up to be a full sandbox – php5, mysql5 and of course apache are all installed. I’m working within subversion and it’s a real pleasure not to have to reboot all the time to get to applications such as Office and Photoshop! Then I’ve managed to get Parallels working, so I have a Windows 2000 desktop just in case I need to test IE. Very fine.
Irritations so far: mostly keyboard-related, which could be solved with a proper Apple keyboard rather than using my mobile USB one; the trackpad is a bit annoying but I’ve been taking my Mighty Mouse with me so that’s circumventable; I’m still getting used to OS X in terms of setting things to start up on boot but that’s easy since it’s BSD at the core; Printers crashed today when the Bonjour service was being a bit nosey.
Other than that, fine. No, you can’t have it, I’m happy with it.
March 13, 2007 at 1:09 pm
want