Let me preface this by saying that this post is about 1.5-3 months old.  I figured I should finally get this draft out there (by splitting this topic up into 3 chunks) so I am able to get on with the "Bad" and the "Ugly" sections.  Without further ado!  The good!

At work my 2-2.5 year Sony VAIO was showing signs of dying. I know these signs all too well:

  • Keys are "sketchy" and only sometimes work
  • Power connector is loose
  • Screen randomly goes flickers on and off
  • etc

So it was time for a new work laptop. Recently there has been an influx of MacBooks within our small developer staff, and pretty much everyone seemed to be happy with their purchases; so why not, sign me up for a MacBook Pro! I guess it should be noted I received the 17" MacBook Pro, the 4th generation one with the multitouch mousepad.  So here is my somewhat longwinded take on the newest member of my laptop family.

The Good

Cat nap avatar

So upon first booting up the 'ol mac everything did seem to just work. Perhaps it was fate, but the day before I received my laptop, I had bought my first iTunes mp4s. To those not in the know when it comes to purchasing stuff from iTunes, they basically take down all of your [billing] info and store it in some super-secret location. So when the mac asked me if I had an account, I just entered in my info and BAM! all of my contat info was immediately entered in. The next step was to take a picture of yourself so everyone you talk to can see what you look like. Sadly, I opt'd out of this and replaced it with the avatar that I've currently been using on forums, IM programs, etc.

Adium

I'd have to say that I'm really impressed with Adium as my main instant messaging client. Previously I was mainly using pidgin under Ubuntu/Windows. It worked near flawlessly under Ubuntu with a few bugs in Windows. So far I've had minimal complaints with Adium. The fact that almost every aspect of it is themeable is pretty nice, as well as it's integration with growl. Aside from the learning curve it takes to learn any new program, Adium as the instant messaging client is at least one aspect of OS X that I really like.

Growl

As mentioned above growl is a global notification program for OS X. As of right now I have it hooking into Adium as well as Mail. So any time I receive an IM or an email, I get a small notification "pop-up" in one of the 4 designated corners of my screen, which then fades away a few seconds later. If I'm idle, growl will actually leave them on the screen as a "sticky" popup. Neat! I've been told that Growl will sometimes hog some of your computers resources for some reason or another, but I still have yet to experience it.

Quicksilver

As I've discussed with my friend Jason, quicksilver is probably my favorite part of OS X so far. Their slogan act without doing is probably the best way to describe it. Essentially this replaces the old launcher that was used by OS X, but it does so. much. MORE!. Here's a small list of things you can do, all with a few keystrokes (and ONLY keystrokes!)

  • Launch or switch to an application (I use it to switch more than using the commant-tab menu)
  • Find/Open files, documents, photos, etc - essentially any directory you setup for QS to index
  • Open up a contact's information
  • Email a contact (and even attach a file!)
  • Automate text entry for almost any webpage
    • Google Search
    • Google Image Search
    • IMDB
    • Wikipedia
    • Webster's Dictionary
    • Anything that uses search string in the URL
  • Repeat/Find anything within your bash history

At first it's hard to keep in mind that you can do all this stuff. But if you force yourself to use it, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much QS can do and how customizable it is. It took me a while to get the search engine functionality down, but now it works fairly well. If anyone needs help with it, I'd be more than happy to elaborate on it in another post.

Virtualization and BootCamp

Parallels Vs VMWare Fusion

As the company I work for does 90% of our web development offering full support for the Internet Explorer family of browsers, I need windows. Previously in Ubuntu I was using VirtaulBox, an insanely awesome (and free!) virtualization program. Since this is a company laptop, I figured I would try out some of the not-so-free programs and see how they worked. The two obvious choices for OS X are Parallels and VMWare Fusion. I initially tried Parallels, thought it was alright, after about a week I tried VMWare Fusion, and thought it was alright as well - possibly a little better. Within Fusion, the performance seems a little better, the Unity/Coherence mode seems to be integrated a bit better and Fusion seems to offer more configuration options. Other than that, There really isn't that much of a difference. For the most part it's all up to the users preference. But between both choices, they both function great and work very well without unnecessary tweaking.

The other option is to run Windows natively using BootCamp. I had a horrible time attempting to get this installed (we'll get to that later), but once installed, running Windows on the mac is great. Initially after you setup your partition, and boot into Windows, you can load all the necessary drivers for it by just inserting your OS X cd. Brilliant! So now you ahve your function keys, right clicks, multi-touch, wifi; basically everything that worked in OS X is now available to you in windows. I'm hoping to use the drivers on this cd to help my Ubuntu partition along when I get around to installing it.

Misc

A few other things worth noting, but aren't worth going into (or will get elaborated on later):

  • Tunnelblick - A VPN Client
  • Spaces - New to OS X 10.5!
  • HotKeys - Volume, Brightness, etc.
  • Multi-Touch Touchpad - Finger Fun on the Touchpad
  • Integrated iSight Camera - Mac

The Bad

Unfortunately this hasn't been a completely hassle free transition.  "The Bad": coming soon.