My Initial Mac

After years of working with Windows, Linux, OS/2, I have always wanted to get into the Mac but never had the motivation or reason to spend the money to get a Mac. Well with the release of the Intel based Macs earlier this year and the ability to run Linux and Windows in virtualization via Parallels and soon VMware I took the plunge and bought me a MacBook on 11/29/2006. After seeing the features of Windows Vista and waiting for its release, I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade to Vista within the year or so unless it occurs at work. For personal home, entertainment, and personal multiplatform research use, I am going with Mac OS X.

After using it for a few days I am happy to say that I really like the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and the Mac in general. There are some extremely intuitive and unique capabilities on the Mac OS X that I have not seen on Linux, OS/2, or Windows. The Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Dashboard, Expose, HotCorners UI features name just a few. These are the features that I have been using extensively. There is this UI automation feature which I haven't even gotten into yet. I forgot the name of it but it looks exactly the type of thing I was looking for in a 21st century operating system.

As far as multimedia is concerned, the Mac just blows away Windows in my opinion and experience. I have used Windows Media Center Edition and compared to the Mac, it looks like a half-baked experiment. The Mac multimedia device experience is like an extremely polished and intuitive appliance. It is just something you have to experience personally is all that I can say.

I still have a lot to learn about the Mac architecture, Darwin, Cocoa, Aqua, X11 on the Mac and more. After just running on it for a few days, I am excited to say that I like it! I will be blogging a lot more about the Mac in this blog and more in the next few years. Given that I do almost everything on the web or online now, switching to a Mac was a piece of cake for me. Mozilla Firefox and Safari work nicely and I had almost nothing to learn from a user perspective.

From a software engineering perspective, Mac OS X totally embraces Java which is good for me since I have been working with Java technology for a long time. I have been finding quite a bit of open source stuff for the Mac which is nice to know. I really like all the Dashboard Widgets. For the future, I have been looking at the previews of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard that Apple has been putting on their website and it has some innovations that again will make my next Mac OS X upgrade in 2007 a more capable Mac. The new Spaces and TimeMachine capabilities are a step into the future.

I will continue working with Linux and Windows since that is how I make a living but it would be nice to be able to make a living working on Mac OS X for web development. At any rate, I hope your future computing is as enjoyable as I foresee mine will be. After just a few days of using my MacBook, I feel better about my computing future already. In addition to all the above, I forgot to mention that my MacBook just aesthetically looks and physically feels cool under my fingers.