Pure Mac
This week, I’m a happy geek: I was able to persuade my boss to buy me a Mac as my new workstation. And although Apple freshened the notebook line in interval between the order being placed and it actually arriving at my house, I’m very happy with the 17″ MacBook Pro as-is. But the point of this is not to get into the specs or version envy, it’s about why I’m so passionate about it being a Mac.
High end, portable power. 32-bit windows has an upper limit on usable RAM at ~3G. Our development environment isn’t that fat yet, but it’s only getting bigger. Running Eclipse, Tomcat, MS Office, InDesign, MySQL, a couple web browsers, and it’s quickly approaching the point where you start taking a huge performance hit for paging your apps on/off disk.
The only answer is to get into a 64-bit OS to address more memory. I don’t want to fight with 64-bit windows, since I’m not confident in all the compatibility stuff (notably our VPN software). Apple has successfully made the switch between CPU architectures and OS architectures multiple times, so I’m confident there won’t be 64-bit issues with the software. The 17″ MPB can hold 8G, and I plan on using it.
The alternative is Linux, with the windows-specific stuff running in a virtual machine. That environment, however, would be even more “out there” in our company – at least the Mac has some core use the publishing areas.
Better productivity software. Your computer workstation is your main line to getting things done, and it should support you in that by getting out of your way. I haven’t seen anything in the Windows world that can rival the ecosystem around AppleScript and application interoperability that is designed into OS X. Specifically, I plan on becoming a Quicksilver ninja. Quicksilver is to computer productivity as J.S. Bach is to music: every time you sit down with it, you can find a new nuance that makes you appreciate it more. The best resource I’ve found, even though it’s completely dense, is a PDF enumeration of all the features and plugins.
The other huge productivity win is Spotlight. Built-in full text and file search across the entire machine is like having a private Google. I admit, I never tried Google Desktop,but I’m more confident in Spotlight, since it’s built-in to the OS, and developers are encouraged to make their files compatible with its indexer. Entourage (aka Outlook for Mac) by default extracts copies of all attachments to a cache in your Documents folder, enabling Spotlight to pick them up. I’ve been able find attached file content in single-digit seconds this week, a task I’d often downgrade to a manual filename search, taking at least a minute.
And then there’s OmniFocus, with its rich iPhone integration. I’m just getting started there, so I’ll have to save that for a future post.
I’m also banking on OmniGraffle, an alternative to Visio. A picture is worth a thousand words, and the better looking your picture, the more it’s taken seriously. The defaults in Visio are just ugly, reminiscent of a 80′s flowchart stencil barfing on your paper. OmniGraffle, on the other hand, has gorgeous defaults, tasteful shadows and curves that let you create a picture worthy of your ideas. If the defaults aren’t enough, check out the user contributions at Graffletopia.
Honorable mention:
- UNIX. The power to drop down into a command line and stitch together a series of commands for a complex search or file manipulation is unrivaled. Among geeks, this counts as productivity tools
- Time Machine. How many people backup their laptop regularly, or go to the trouble of buying decent backup software? Now, I just plug in an external disk and forget about it.
- Battery life. How much time is wasted in meetings crawling under the table to a power strip? I’m consciously going to leave power supplies back at the desk: walk in and flip open the lid, ready to start.
I’m not even going to try and debunk the “macs are more expensive” myth. Given all of the above, even if you thought there was a premium for the Apple brand and hardware sexiness, the delta can still be justified by all the other gains.
