![]() ![]() From pressing the power button to firing up a browser takes less than 30 seconds - compared to several minutes on my wife’s Windows laptop (a couple minutes more if it won’t connect to the wi-fi). However now I just fire up my Mac while sitting on the sofa in the lounge and do what I need to do. I have an office in my house that I used to use whenever I went on-line. I have no problems at all using Visual Studio inside my Mac (which is still the best development tool I’ve ever used) and it means I get the best of both worlds. Since my Macbook uses an Intel processor, Windows runs almost as quickly inside Mac OS X as it would do on its own. I’ve always been keen to try and create usable software and I feel that Mac software takes usability to a higher level.Īs I mentioned before I still do my Windows development (plug: John’s Background Switcher) on the Mac using VMWare Fusion. It’s a completely different language and toolkit to what I’ve used before but it seems sensibly organised and I’m enjoying learning something new - along with the user interface design guidelines which are quite different to the Windows ones. I’ve bought a couple of books on the subject of writing software for the Mac. I shudder to use marketingspeak but I really felt “empowered” for the first time in my computing life. It’s possible to do all these things on a Windows box but you’d have to track down and buy the software, it would either cost a fortune or integrate poorly - whereas it all comes as standard on a Mac and works seamlessly together while actually making it fun to do so. I could create and order an surprisingly high quality photobook (in fact our wedding photo album was made in iPhoto and looks fantastic). I could write and sing my own score without it sounding terrible (GarageBand has some effects that make even the worst singing voice sound reasonable), I could edit video clips and put them as a chapter on the DVD and do a host of other cool things. I could take a bunch of photos from a holiday, turn them into a slide-show, put them on a DVD that my father’s DVD player could play. Having been constrained to the more business-oriented Windows machines I was suddenly free to be creative. (So far I’ve managed to get one friend to buy one - result!). In only a few weeks I had turned into one of these “you should buy a Mac” people just like John - evangelising Macs at every opportunity. My wife’s less-than-perfect experience of her Vista laptop randomly restarting itself for ‘critical’ updates and it frequently failing to connect to our wi-fi unless I restarted the networking was in contrast to my stress-free life with my Mac where everything just works. There are a hundred other things I could cite but in short, once I got used to the different operating system I started to love it and any time spent on a PC felt incredibly frustrating, as though it was trying to get in my way. Being able to see all the windows for a current application at the same time (via F10) or all applications (F9) has now become second-nature and when I’m on a PC I really miss it. I love the look and feel of Mac OS X, it seems to be much less cluttered than Windows and it makes intelligent choices about what you’re trying to do rather than badgering you with endless wizards filled with stupid questions. I love being able to SSH onto my web server rather than going through a Windows app. I didn’t find myself missing the overly cluttered Windows taskbar and Start button one bit. I had to work out where everything was and what all the keyboard shortcuts were, but in no time I was moving around like a pro. ![]() Moving from Windows to Mac OS X was a little tricky at first. ![]() And you know what? I’ve never looked back! I gave my Windows laptop to my wife, blitzed my desktop PC at home and that left me with only my Macbook to do my web surfing, emailing, Windows software development (more about that later) and any other computer related activities. And what better place to do that than the blog of the man who made it all happen?įirst of all, in true John Conners style, I went all out. So here I am five months so later and I thought it was about time I wrote about my experiences being a proper Mac user. ![]() At the time I was smitten since I’d just bought the thing and was overcome by the amazing styling and classy touches. Fast forward to April (only a few weeks later) and I wrote about the fact that I’d finally caved in and bought a Mac - a Macbook to be precise. As you can see from John’s eloquently written article, he made a very good case. At the time I was a lifelong Windows user (well, since Windows 3.1) and for as long as I’d known him John had been trying to persuade me to buy a Mac. Way back in March John (Topley) wrote an article on my site titled ‘ The Case For The Mac‘. John Conners to be precise (from John’s Adventures fame). ![]()
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