I'm now just past the six month mark since tentatively purchasing my first Mac and beginning to switch away from Windows. At the time I bought my MacBook I had a number of machines in the house, all running either Windows or Ubuntu. What I've tried to do on this blog is provide a kind of running commentary on switching, hitting on some of the challenges I've encountered, the native Mac applications I've found and the general feelings I've had about making the switch.

What I find interesting after 6 months is the impact buying that little MacBook had not only on the way I handle my personal computing but to a large degree the influence it has had on the way I do my development work. You see after I bought the MacBook I found myself doing more and more with it. I had a Windows XP development / gaming rig parked directly in front of me but I was constantly sliding my hands over to the MacBook.

My entire development platform—at the time Visual Studio—was completely set up and I had my after-market libraries installed and was using it to build my next online service business. Even with all of my development experience being Windows based I constantly found myself pushing away from my XP system and over to the MacBook. This was not helping my productivity, at least on the development front.

I rationalized that if I bought a Mac Pro that I could install VMware Fusion on it and use that as my primary development platform. I was obviously hooked on OS X and the idea of having a machine with 8 cores and 12GB of RAM running it was pretty cool. I bought the Mac Pro, placed it in the position of being my primary workstation (pushing the Windows XP machine off to the side) and I was off and running.

I was quickly able to get the Mac Pro up and running with Windows XP and my development environment in a VMware Fusion instance. With a couple of minor exceptions it worked great, providing me with everything I needed to build my web based solutions just as I had been on my native Windows XP machine.

Not long after all this I started to look at Ruby on Rails as an option for development, something that would serve as a replacement for my Visual Studio environment. Why? Much like with Windows itself, I had been doing the same kind of development for a very long time. Given the recent sale of my last company I have the luxury of defining fully the tools I could use to build my next generation of products and I wanted to see if there was an easier way to build Web 2.0-like web applications.

Though it took me a month of getting up to speed on Ruby on Rails I found it to be a fantastic platform for building what I needed to create. With a very English-like language, an extensive library of free plugins, nice Ajax support built in and the ability to get a basic application framework up and running in a matter of hours, RoR was exactly what I was looking for. In two short months I've made far more progress than I did in the 4+ months I spent building my solution in VS .NET / C#.

On top of all that, it turns out most of the core Ruby on Rails guys are Mac people too. OS X already comes with RoR and the fact that I could use TextMate, easily one of the best programming editors I have ever experienced, was a huge plus.

I suddenly found myself using my Macs exclusively. I wasn't even firing up the Windows XP instance because I only needed it for Visual Studio. The Windows XP gaming rig was powered down and resting in the corner, serving mostly as a device to crack my knee on if I swiveled my chair too quickly. Fortunately I was able to find a buyer for it, leaving me without any native Windows hardware (well, my wife and son are still using XP).

Selling the XP rig gave me the money to purchase a MacBook Pro, giving the MacBook to my youngest daughter. She couldn't be happier ditching the Dell she had for it and is constantly using the machine. Photo Booth alone has provided her with endless amounts of fun and she's using the iSight camera to do video chats with her cousin in California.

Then, suddenly, the iPhone became part of our digital lives. When Sprint dropped the ball and our service failed miserably I bit the bullet and bought my wife and I both a couple of iPhones. It's been a fantastic device and my phone reception (contrary to many reports I've read) has been excellent. The best part of getting the iPhone though was watching my non-technical wife not only use it but embrace it completely. Between pulling down her e-mail and doing some web browsing while out shopping, I was shocked by how quickly she took to it. This from a woman that had up to this point in time never sent a single text message. She sends text messages regularly now with our daughters.

She now finally wants a Mac of her own and is going to get one for her birthday next month. I'll be writing about how she adapts to using it as well. Now that summer is winding down and our extended vacations are coming to an end I'll have a little more time to commit to blogging.

Here is a typical Apple users way of glossing over anything that will take away from Apple's prestige. I find it sneaky he specifically glosses over what these "minor exceptions" are. Would it have hurt to write a few sentences to document these "minor exceptions"?

First of all, this guy is not a "typical Apple user," much as you would like to paint him as such. He is an ex-Windows user who, by anybody's standards, qualifies as an expert, having built a small start up web-search company into an Inc500 list company on the strength of his Windows programing expertise.

Secondly, he doesn't gloss over them—he provides a link to his own blog on the complaints. Here they are:

Keyboard Shortcuts: Visual Studio makes heavy use of function keys, especially for debugging. By default the critical ones I use most are F10 (Step Over) and F11 (Step Into) and F9 (Toggle Breakpoint). On my Mac's keyboard the F9 key advances the song/track in the player, F10 mutes the speaker and F11 lowers the volume - these are special feature keys for OS X and work in any application you happen to be in.
You can flip a toggle in the System Preferences to allow the Functions to operate as standard keys, in which case they will not work as special feature keys unless I hold down the fn key on my keyboard. Likewise if I have the option in System Preferences unchecked I need to hit fn in order to access the keys as standard F keys.
There was also one other layer of complexity added to all of this: by default OS X ships with some keyboard shortcuts of it's own that also conflict with things. This threw me for a little while because by default some of those F keys are mapped to Spaces and Expose.
What I ended up doing was eliminating the Spaces, Expose and Dashboard use of the F9 through F12 keys; I use the mouse for that stuff anyway. I also keep the option to use the special key feature enabled, meaning that if I want F10 to be passed down to my application I need to hold the fn key too. It's a pain in the ass but I really like having the special keys enabled. Too many functions for too few keys.
I really do wish the fn key was a toggle, not a modifier key though. That would make it so much easier. I spent a couple of hours researching how to make it work that way but had no luck.
Using the Keyboard to Navigate Text: I've mentioned before that the text navigation keys between Windows and Mac are different. On Windows you use Ctrl-Right, Ctrl-Left to move the cursor one word at a time to the right or left. On Mac it's Option-Right, Option-Left. Well, this creates a little conflict when using VMware Fusion and Visual Studio.
By default OS X uses Ctrl-Right to move to the Spaces window to the right, Ctrl-Left to the Spaces window to the left. As a big time Spaces user I've found this excellent, unfortunately I've had to disable the feature since I really need the ability to Ctrl-Right and Left arrow through words in Visual Studio. This is not something I'm terribly happy about but I'm trying to get used to it.
Other than these two issues, so far it's been excellent. My development performance has actually increased a bit because all of the applications I've come to count on are now on the Mac Pro.

His primary problem is that one Windows' application, Visual Studio—that was important to him—uses Function keys and Control key combinations that were conflicting with the default settings of the Mac. The Mac allowed him to remap those default Function Keys and Control key combinations and resolved the problem.

Isn't the Internet wonderful? It is extraordinary the things we can learn about Mr. Allison. Here is a complete list containing the beginnings of each of this gentleman's paragraphs. I understand next week he is going to commence a blog describing the clipping of his toenails.

I will let the reader judge for himself the degree to which the author is afflicted with solipsism:

"I'm now just past

What I find

My entire

I rationalized

I was quickly

Not long after all this I started

Though it took me a month

On top of all that, it turns out most of the core Ruby on Rails guys are Mac people too. OS X already comes with RoR and the fact that I could use TextMate,

I suddenly found myself

Selling the XP rig gave me

Then, suddenly, the iPhone became part of our digital lives.

I can scarcely wait to hear the next episode in the excellent adventures of David Allison

Rush Thanks the Apple People

March 11, 2008 RUSH: Last time I was in New York or maybe two times ago, I asked on air, an open-air plea to Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, Inc., to help out with a couple problems I was having with the new operating system: OS 10.5 Leopard. Let me review the problems because it was funny. You know, every time I talk about Apple... I read a lot of Apple Web blogs just to keep up with the latest what's happening with Macs and iPhones and so forth. Any time I talking about Apple it's just guaranteed that some of these blogs are going to blow gaskets like everybody else does. They're mad that I use a Mac, thinking I don't know what I'm talking about when I discuss Mac issues and so forth. It's funny to read. As I mentioned there were two things that would really be helpful. Actually, just only one. The other one was more of a fun thing I wish the computer would do that it was supposed to do. Both have been resolved through the diligent work of an engineer that Apple assigned my IT guy, and the primary problem was with their Time Machine program. They've got this great backup program called Time Machine, and it automatically backs up every hour. You can have a third-party application to set the interval to different times if you don't want to have it done every hour and fill up the backup drive. Regardless, I live, as I told you, in my mail application, my e-mail application; because I don't use the phone much, because I don't like the phone. There's always somebody on the other end. When it rings, you probably have to answer it. I hate hearing the phone. I just despise it. I just don't like it. E-mail has become my number-one way of communicating with people, and that's where I do all of my work, and so there's a lot of important stuff in my e-mail application. I've got four -- I got them installed, by the way, last weekend -- brand-new Mac Pros, 32 gigs of RAM, eight core processors, all the way the fastest speed, whatever they are. I can't remember off the top of the bat. Oh! This is funny, too. I wanted to get two super-drive bays. I've put a Blu-ray drive in the top bay. When I mentioned this last time, one of the snarky comments in one of these blogs was, "I don't think Limbaugh even knows what Blu-ray is, because Apple has not made Blu-ray available." Well, Apple didn't, but there are third-parties. I've got a Blu-ray drive, and I've got some Blu-ray blank disks, dual-sided, 50 gigabyte. Now, you can't play Blu-ray movies on them because the hardware is not on the computer yet to play Blu-ray movies, but I didn't get Blu-ray to watch movies on the computer. I have a theater. I've got big TVs. I don't need to watch it on a computer screen. I got it for data transfer and so forth. Anyway, so the Blu-ray is in there and the thing is working just fine and dandy. But the mail program, this Time Machine, is amazing. It just backs up everything on the computer as often as you want, every hour (or less than that, but every hour is the max), and then you can go back in time. It's an amazing interface. If you've deleted an e-mail accidentally or any other file from anywhere on the computer, you can go back and get it and have it restored to the present day on your hard drive -- except, mail wouldn't do that. I couldn't go back and access mail. I could see it. The e-mail or a series of e-mails that I wanted from say three months were there. I'd click restore, and they did restore, but in some esoteric file in the user library in an unidentified way, so I couldn't identify which ones they were. They did not restore them in the mail index in the actual application. An Apple engineer was assigned to us, and the fix took place last night. I did two weeks of trying it, creating logs for the Apple engineers to look at, and they found the problem. Basically, what we had to do was delete the null mail folder (that's the folder that processes all e-mail) and then we told the mail app to rebuild its internal director via terminal command, and now it is working flawlessly. So I just wanted to take a moment to thank people at Apple. I'm not going to mention the name of the engineer. I would love to, but if I did, this guy would be taking heat for the rest of his career from people for helping me. But they were very cooperative, and I think it's going to end up having to be a system-wide fix, which is good, because it's been discovered. The other issue was if you have a dot-Mac account, which is a service that Apple offers -- I don't want to spend too much time on it, but if you have one of those -- you can use it to share the screens of your other computers. Now, I have two here in Florida and two in New York, and they are not synchronized because I'm not in New York very much. So the data that's on those computers... What if I need an e-mail from there? I can get it now with the screen sharing, but it wasn't working via dot-Mac. I had set it up to work with a direct correct on a VNC direct connect, but it wasn't working via back to my Mac. They fixed that as well. That has been done. So I just wanted to thank Apple again for taking the time to look into this, because the backup and the Time Machine application used with mail app was crucial. (interruption) Okay, what now? What? What? (interruption) Mmm-hmm. Algore is not going to fire anybody. Algore is probably going to say, "Wow, I can use mail now with Time Machine?" He'll probably go home and try it and see if it works. I don't even know... Somebody said, "Make 'em name the patch after you." There will be a patch. I don't think they'll say anything about it other than in the release notes of the next security update or system update. But, anyway, I wanted to fill you in on the details of this, because it was very nice them and they were extremely dilligent. It took a lot of time to find out what the glitch was. We had to log every time we try it, and we tried a bunch of times on purpose knowing it would fail creating logs of what was going on. So it was discovered that the null mail folder had to be deleted and then rebuilt in the internal directory with the terminal command. It was a small little terminal command, too, for those of you geeks on the blogs -- and, no, I'm not going to share the terminal command here. No, I'm not going to do that.

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