After recently revisiting my Blog and downloading a trial version of NetNewsWire I’ve realized how bad I’ve been about keeping up. Specifically I’ve ignored my series on switching from my PC to my Mac. So here’s a catch-up, 6 months later.
I’m happy to say my 15″ PowerBook is still with me. Recently it has become my primary work machine in my new job and sees 8+ hours of use per day. Despite the now infamous LCD white spots problem I can safely report that it succeeds at this job with miraculous abandon. My day-to-day applications are Camino, Office X, iMail, iCal, Yahoo Messenger and, without which I would have sold my PowerBook, LaunchBar. The PC in my bed room, my trusty Athlon 2000XP machine which I built almost 18 months ago has seen almost no use whatsoever beyond Quicken. I’ll get to that in a minute. So why, might you ask, have I been so pleased with my Mac? Let me dig in.
First off my new job has kept me away from day-to-day coding. As sad as that may sound, especially since I work for a Java company, I’ve been able to stay away from the one area where my Mac lacks. Our current product is targeted at JDK 1.5 which is unsupported on OS X. I truly hope Apple catches up to Sun soon with their 1.5 betas. Hey Jobs, think about this; the intelligensia who live and breath Java believe in cross-platform software. They want to use your platform but Java is a second class citizen, that’s why they always target Windows and Linux first. Do the math (and get your JDK directory structure fixed). But I’m digressing; my day is now lived in productivity apps.
For productivity I spend my day in email and on the web. For mail I’m using two applications, iMail and Entourage. I originally transitioned to the PowerBook with iMail for my personal pop email. It’s a fabulous email client and is more than capable for my personal mail. When it came to my work Exchange server I decided to use Office X’s Entourage for mail. It links directly with Exchange and includes an integrated calendar. These are the two key pieces of information I need on a daily basis. Though not a full blown equivalent to iMail it still works very well. Furthermore I can run it on the same user account as iMail and see both work and personal mail. Good enough for me. For a short time I was using a second account on my machine with iMail connected to Exchange. This worked ok but I found it painful switching between my personal and work accounts on the same machine. Call me lazy but I don’t like switching users. Is there a way to get iMail to support multiple identities without switching accounts?
Instant Messaging is about as important at my work as air is to most life on Earth. Without it or email we would starve and die. Yahoo is the preferred IM client. I don’t have any issues with it except for the fact that it lags behind the Windows version in features. With only 5% market share I can understand their priorities. If only GAIM were completely ported to OS X.
Finally the last piece of software that I use on a daily basis is LaunchBar. Being a dedicated Windows user and developer you have to understand that I love the keyboard. In an ideal day I would not use the mouse at all. Thanks to both the accessibility initiative and it being designed by geeks for geeks, Windows can be completely keyboard driven. Instead of using the Start menus’ Programs section to launch programs I use the Run command. I’m an addict of Start->Run, entering URLs and full EXE names (visio32, winword, msmsgs, etc) as shortcuts to my favorite programs. The Mac, on the other hand, has no such option.
To launch a program you have to either use the Finder or the Dock. The Dock is a great step away from the Finder but it either requires a mouse or a special keystroke combo. Even with a keystroke it only support launching the icons present, not any program on the system. Enter LaunchBar. With a simple combination of Command-Space I have, at my fingertips, a textual index to everything on my Mac. It not only indexes my Applications but also looks into Contacts, my iTunes library, launches URLs and shows my home directory structure. If I want to use RBrowser to connect to an FTP site I hit Command-Space, RBR and hit enter. Need to see the full contact details for Steve Jobs? Command-Space, STEVE J, Command Enter and up comes the Address Book entry. Is it complicated? Not really, not when you end up launching apps all day long as I do. So if you can’t tell by now I’m enamored with this program. Not that this is the only way, but I’ve found I can finally dig into my Mac at light-speed rather than clicking all around.
Finally, in getting back to Quicken, I’ve found the one problem with switching over completely to the Mac. About 4 weeks after purchasing my PowerBook I also bought Quicken Deluxe for the Mac. Had I not assumed it would be able to load my Windows Quicken files I would not have purchased it. As it turns out Windows users trying to switch have no way to import data in Quicken for the Mac outside of their QIF interchange format. This means all account setup info, portfolio, memorized transactions, paychecks, etc, are all lost. Intuit, as both a stockholder and long time customer could you please rectify this? Is it really that hard to use the same file format?
So besides the white spots and the Quicken issues I’ve been in love with my new Mac. I could keep writing on about other great features such as how fast it comes out of sleep, that the external monitor connector functions as a dual monitor display, how Expose makes navigation easy, how Mozilla’s Camino browser is too simple & fast, how Office X is much more elegant and eye pleasing that Office for Windows and how I love the keyboard almost as much my old ThinkPad. But that’s for another time.
Speaking of Mail, I actually flipped a bit again and have setup a new user account on my machine dedicated to work. I use Mail for Exchange mail and iCal+SnerdWare’s GroupCal to get my Exchange calendar. Mail is AWESOME, the threaded view just works so very well for my daily email. I’m actually no longer using my work PC with Outlook, finding Mail as my daily client. So far so good but I’m not sure GroupCal from snerdware is the right answer. Anyone else using iCal to access Exchange?