It's time for a Mac

-
Finally, I succumbed to the pressure and bought it. After months of procrastination and countless visits to the Apple shop, I managed to make the decision and splash out for a 17" MacBookPro with a non-glossy (antiglare) display.

My first impressions are very positive. The Mac is an amazingly beautiful piece of hardware and the OS is just a joy to work with.

the antiglare display
Having seen both displays in the shop I am absolutely certain I  made the right choice. I've also used it in bright sunshine and put simply it's the best screen I've ever used outdoors without a problem.

the keyboard
The backlit keyboard it's just beautiful. Although my friend vpapanik has opted for a completely blank keyboard, I must say that when the lights go off the glow from below is quite pretty and useful.

the performance
This machine (I bought the 2.66GHz not the 2.93 one) is actually fast! Running my CPU-demanding Maze to produce a really large maze, was 15% faster on a virtual Win2k machine on the Mac, than my massive desktop Windows PC (Core2 DUO 2.13GHz)!!! That was a nice surprise.

the OS
Having UNIX in the back-end skinned with Leopard's pretty pictures makes such a nice environment to work with.

the Software
Not surprisingly the software that comes with the Mac (and I include iWork as well) looks consistent and purposely designed with the user in mind. iPhoto is nice, although I much prefer the more powerful (and much more expensive) Adobe LightRoom for my picture workflow so I haven't used it that much.

overall
All in all, the experience is worth it. I bought the Mac with the view of writing applications for my iPod; at the moment I'm only staring at the surface. But in terms of having a powerful (and not-very-portable) laptop that can host most of my needs I have to say that I have not seen anything that can come close to enclosing such power and beauty in a box than the 17" MacBookPro. I have already started thinking about whether I need my desktop to be honest.

Mac vs PC
Now that's a much discussed subject that probably demands a special blog-post. As a programmer who has written millions of lines for Windows (and MS) operating systems over the years, I feel obliged to mention that I can't jump ship that easily. There's no need for animosity between Mac and PC users. Both are quite nice to work with. There are things that I like on both systems and I believe that they can co-exist with each other.

The only difference between the two is that I can run Windows VMs on my Mac, but I can't run Mac OS X on a VM that runs on windows. And from that point of view Mac "wins" not because of ability but because of licensing policy... :-\ And that's not very nice, is it?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

GetDIBits vs. Scanline vs. Pixels[] in Delphi Bitmaps

-
I've been always wanting to sit down one day and solve this problem; test the speed of manipulating pixels on a Bitmap using the three options: - the convenient but understandably slow Pixels[], - the "interesting" Scanline property and - the Windows API GetDIBits and SetDIBits. I have been traditionally using Pixels for quick work and the Get/SetDIBits for low-level pixel manipulation such as the filters used in ToolBox . Never really used the Scanline property in anger, I was always thinking, DIBits "had" to be quicker. Little I knew... I have been experimenting with two tools that I've written and never released to the public domain. The first is the BMPCreator which I wrote in order to create 256-level grayscale bitmaps, the other is the IconCreator which uses a grayscale bitmap and applies color maps to it, giving you the ability to create different colored versions of the same icon (like in my database visualization tool VirtualTreeNavigator ). Yesterd...
Read more

Installation of Mint 17.1 Cinnamon on VMWare

-
It's been 2.5 years since I posted an installation guide of installing Ubuntu 12.10 on VMWare Workstation but the release of Linux Mint 17.1 has prompted me to write an updated guide. This is the third of my guides, acting mostly as a memo for a quick install of new distros on VMWare, my first one written in 2009 ( Linux on VMWare with later additions of other posts full of little hints and reminders (e.g. fonts, keymaps)). Ingredients Please note that these instructions work for most distros, although this post focuses on Mint 17.1 A downloaded ISO image of your favourite distro ( Mint , Mint LMDE , Ubuntu , Debian ) A newly created virtual machine with 2-8GB of RAM, a 40-60GB disk and a couple of CPU cores. Installation Mount the ISO image to your VM's optical drive and boot it up, then follow the instructions to install your distro selecting your preferences (timezone, keyboard layout, etc.). For accessing your VM via ssh from your host, it helps if your Lin...
Read more

Chrome Packaged Apps

-
Image
For a few years now I use Windows, Linux, OS X daily. For years, I've been looking into a language/framework/product that will allow me to build (desktop) applications that can run on all of these OS's. I've looked into QT , PyQT , Java Swing and others. I've looked into the cloud , PaaS , web applications but I couldn't find something that I liked. Of course, HTML5 has gained a lot of momentum and I've been following it from the very first day, so I was "double" happy when I found out about the Chrome Packaged Apps that look and behave like desktop apps, they can however live perfectly in the cloud and are built purely with web technologies. The fact they can run on my Chromebook too, is the cherry on top. Hello World! No time to lose, I jumped into the proverbial Hello World app, which run on my stable Chrome 27.0.1448.0 without a glitch. You have to follow instructions on the previous link to enable the Experimental Extension APIs on chro...
Read more