Current Environment

I think the best thing to discuss right off the bat is the hardware and software environment that I have put together. As I had mentioned before, the main requirement that I had when switching to the OS X platform was that I couldn't lose any functionality of my Windows XP and Vista platforms. I had to be able to continue working on my engineering and photography tasks without any hiccups. Believe it or not, meeting this requirement was quite easy and I had accomplished it within two days of having the Mac in my possession. So, without further delay, here is the line up...

HARDWARE

I have always preferred a laptop over a desktop for work tasks. It allows me the freedom to work wherever I want and also allows me to take it to any meeting or event I plan on attending. Since I was already set on leaving the WinWorld and going to Mac this made the choice pretty simple; MacBook or MacBook Pro.

I was sold on the MBP almost immediately based on the fact that the MB only has a 13 inch screen whereas the MBP has the 15.4 or 17 inch screen. I have had a 13 inch screen before and also a 17 inch widescreen before and neither were ideal. The 15.4 inch screen is perfect. I went with the base model in the MBP line based on cost; my wife got one at the same time so Apple shareholders were very happy with me that week!

Along with the 15.4 inch screen I got the standard 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB memory, and upgraded to the 250GB hard drive. The last thing to decide on was whether to get the matte or glossy screen. After comparing two laptops I had I decided I really like to glossy screen for photography work. The colors are more rich (especially the blacks) and the contrast seems to be a bit higher. Overall I just think it has a better look to it. However, it does have a lot more glare than a matte screen but it never bothered me with my old laptop and doesn't bother me now.

SOFTWARE

When I started looking into software solutions to my problems I decided that I wanted to run as much of it on OS X as possible. I knew I was going to need a virtual machine solution for my build environment but I did not want to rely on it for anything more than just the builds. The following paragraphs list out each solution I have decided to use up to this point.

VMware Fusion: The build environment that I deal with at work is a two part environment; one part on Windows XP using Visual Studio 2005 and the other part using a custom tool chain based around GCC on Linux. I heard nothing but good things about both Parallels and VMware but decided to go with VMware. With this I can run two virtual machines, one Windows XP SP2 and one Ubuntu 7.10, and get all the functionality I need on the Mac. After running the builds in the VM's I found that the speed was quite comparable to running on a true XP machine so the virtualization does not sacrifice any performance! I was happily surprised.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac: I was very displeased with Office 2007 for Windows. The new UI was a pain to use and I just had an overall displeasure using it. I looked into some alternatives to Office but ended up sticking with the giant. To be completely honest, I was extremely surprised with this software suite. From the second I got my Mac I was amazed at how nice and polished everything looked. Office 2008 for Mac continued on with that trait. Everything from the tool pallets (sidebars / toolbars on Windows) to the opening splash screen looks so much better than the Windows versions. All the annoying UI components in Office 2007 for Windows do not exist in Office 2008 for Mac. The UI is very different, which is to be expected, but they are very easy to use and after writing a two page document I have become accustomed to them. All I can say is that Office 2008 for Mac is the best Microsoft product I have used in a long time.

Perforce: The company I work for uses Perforce as our source control management solution. So I had to go with Perforce. As I said above, I wanted to use everything on Mac as possible so I went with the Mac version. Nothing to report on this topic other than that it works just fine. The problem that I have is that my company only has a Windows based VPN solution so I can only connect to the work servers from home using the Windows virtual machine. So I will eventually need to install the Windows version in the VM to manage source control from outside of the office. While I am at the office the OS X version works just fine.

Adobe Creative Suite 3: I have found that CS3 runs a heck of a lot faster on OS X then it does on Windows Vista. Not just a little faster... MUCH faster. Program open times and applying filters to large image files in Photoshop only takes a fraction of the time it took on Vista. I am extremely pleased at the performance on OS X and will continue to sing praises for CS3.

Chicken of the VNC: A great VNC program for OS X.

Cyberduck: A great FTP program for OS X.

These are just the main programs that I have installed over the last few weeks to solve various tasks that I perform on a daily basis. There are a lot of other great applications out there for OS X that I haven't needed yet but will download eventually. A basic Google search will turn many of them up. There are also a lot of applications that came with OS X Leopard that I use daily; Mail.app, iCal, Address Book, and iTunes to name a few. I couldn't live without my browser extensions so I did install Firefox for my web browsing instead of using Safari. Nothing against Safari of course... I just love Firefox.

So this should give you a pretty good baseline on the software that I am using to perform all the things I do in both engineering and photography on the Mac. It has been three week since I made the switch to Mac and I haven't looked back once yet. In fact, after getting all the files off of my Vista laptop it has sat under my coffee table (yes, the symbolism is wonderful isn't it?) awaiting its eventual listing on eBay.

Are you an OS X user with a great hint or tip on must have software? If so, let me know!