Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Moving (back) to Mac

So my work laptop died. It wasn't a particularly surprising death - the signs were there if you chose to look for them, and I've reached the stage in life where I've dealt with this before, so the grieving process is familiar now. Did I say grieving? I think I meant backing up re-installing.

I did decide to make it significantly more complicated this time, as I'm changing platforms. After 10 years away, I'm going back to using a Mac as my work machine. I took a hard look at my options, and decided that I want to be compatible with the development teams I'm working with, and the best tools for doing the kind of work I am doing (e-business architecture) are Mac tools - Omnifocus and Omnigraffle are on my short list.

Also, it seems that while I have been away the maddening process of managing extensions has been done away with, what with the switch to Unix under the hood.

I'm a bit apprehensive - I'll be learning new UI conventions, figuring out which open source software is the best, and lugging around a much heavier laptop.

I'm also excited - I love learning new things, and I'm really looking forward to getting back to Mac.

Wish me luck.

12 comments:

claylo said...

Sweet! Welcome back, Kevin! Good luck!

Steve said...

My top tips:

Get menumeters:

http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/

- Command-Option-Esc to get a Force-Quit dialog

- Burn this into your brain: Command-Shift-F4: gives you crosshairs, with which you can take a targetted screenshot (and/or notably: a pixel measurement). Now go to any file dialog, go to your Desktop folder, and select the Picture *.jpg file with the highest number.

- go to System Prefs, Keyboard to jack up your Key Repeat Rate and Delay Until Repeat

- in the trackpad options I always check the secondary-clicks-with-two-fingers-plus-button option. It's MacBook right-click.

- buy textmate and love it

- skitch is kinda cool too

Kevin said...

Thanks for the tips. :)

Jeff Tidball said...

I use OmniOutliner as well as OmniFocus and (less frequently, for what I do) OmniGraffle.

I like Transmit as an FTP client, after trying many less satisfying apps.

SpamSieve is heartily best-in-class to filter junk mail as an add-on to Mail.

SuperDuper! is the thing for back-ups to an external drive. Clones a bootable firewire drive of your system, if you like. Has saved my life. Highly recommended.

Adium for IM.

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