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My last year using Apple products has been my best year in computing ever. Although I love my ThinkPad running linux in all of it’s painful freedom, the Macs are hands down the winner for me as a developer.

Before diving into posting on my enjoyment with the MacBook Pro and OSX I’ll go ahead and disclose that since February ‘09 I’ve amassed 4 apple products and each on has given me a nearly flawless overall experience. My first Apple venture was a used MacBook Pro which I purchased in January ‘09.

In May of ‘09 I purchased an iPod Touch from Costco. My purpose for the Touch was to use it as a productivity device for things like auto maintenance records, portable email, task management and most recently MoneyWell maintenance. I also use the iPod Touch as my Bible and frequently pop up the local weather just to keep a bead on whether it’s safe to go outside. ;) Apple has positioned the iPod Touch as a gaming device and I have my fair share of those installed. In a nutshell the iPod Touch quickly became a constant resource for me which I reference many times throughout the day.

If you paused to guess at my Apple devices you probably rattled off “the iPad” and you would be spot on. When Steve Jobs announced the iPad I started firing off uses for it from day one. The wait for a 3G iPad was nearly agonizing, but when I received mine all the great uses I had envisioned for it were manifested. The only short falling I’ve had with the iPad is for creating documents. I haven’t been able to get where I feel productive on the touch keypad. More than two pages of text becomes a chore. But then trying to type a sizeable document challenges my approach of the iPad being for casual computing. An iPad is no slouch, though. I have actually accessed work systems via the Citrix client several times while out and about… a task that previously would have waited until I could get to my laptop on WiFi. But enough on the iPad.

My latest Apple device is a shuffle. In the past 6 months I had begun to use my Touch as a music device and thusly began inflicting some abuse on it that no 300 dollar productivity tool should have to go through. Things like yard work and car work were always a hazard for my high-tech mp3 player so upon the suggestion of an Apple Store dude my wife bought me the shuffle for father’s day 2010. I must make it clear that I would have NEVER paid the money for this device since it’s only a music player. I am now thankful my wife took the gamble since my shuffle is far more portable and I can get 10 - 15 hours of playback on a charge! I almost never use the Touch for music now. I’ll go on record saying I despise the Apple earbuds and dropped an extra 20 bucks on Amazon to buy a Scosche tapSTICK that allows me to use whatever buds I like.

This would be a good place to quickly mention that my introduction to Apple was the 24“ iMac I use at work for Java & Ruby development.

Instead of charging this with ramblings through my mostly disorganized thought patterns I will just divide my post into sections and you can quickly browse to whatever interests you in what I find notable in Apple through my first year.

The OS:

Mac OSX is UNIX (BSD) based. Apple, in my opinion, made a brilliant decision to let an established UNIX OS serve as the foundation they would build from. The architecture that separates the operating system from their shiny new desktop interface is by all measure brilliant. Applications (for the most part) are self contained libraries that leverage Apple’s established server underpinnings. With no need for the registry and myriads of dll dependencies the OSX platform makes installation and removal of most programs as easy as copy and delete. Even upgrading the OS is straight forward with an uncomplicated license structure… one OS, one license. The most frequent comment I hear from people migrating Windows to Mac is that it doesn’t act like Microsoft Windows… “it should be more like Windows.” I just don’t understand comments like that at all.

Perhaps one of my favorite convenience features of the Mac OSX workstation is spotlight. I had a similar feature in openSuSe Linux that allowed a hotkey stroke to drop down a system search tool for launching applications and files. Since Linux and OSX have their apps mostly free standing and not necessarily installed into the program menu the spotlight programs are a perfect solution. Cmd+spacebar on the Mac will produce a textbox in the upper right corner of your screen. Type in something like “firefox” and spotlight will find your app for you, then await your click or enterkey to launch/open the target application or file. Very quick and very clean IMHO.

Other “built in” features that are a joy to use would be:

• ctrl+cmd+4 - this key combination is used to capture a selection into an image on the desktop. Most users would equate this to a ‘grab’ in SnagIt. To capture a selection onto your clipboard ad shift to the combination. I have added Voila! and Little Snapper to my toolkit but rarely have any reason to use them due to Apple’s built in screen capture feature.



• preview - this application is the default acrobat reader application, but it additionally gives you the ability to create new files from you clipboard and annotate them.



• vpn connections - Apple has included software to use for your vpn connections right into the OS.



• dashboard - a space for widgets ranging from computer monitors to calculators and calendars. One keystroke to pop up the dashboard and view the things that are important to you.



• stickies - I passed stickies off as worthless until one day when I realized I had 8 or so post-it notes around my iMac screen. Instantly stickies made sense and I transferred all those quick (disposable) notes INTO my iMac instead of ONTO it.

The Software:

Software running on Apple platforms tend to have a very polished and slick interface with only the necessary options available. The Apple community’s minimalist approach is a very refreshing experience that focuses less on “look what I can do” and more on “look what I did for YOU”. There are exceptions to the slick minimalist observations I’ve made, and I think those exceptions live mostly in applications that were ported from Windows. In my windows days I languished in the effort it took to find whatever menu I really needed to do tasks that are important to me, the Mac has removed those barriers.

Any Windows user with longevity in handling their digital imagery on the file system will likely struggle with the de-facto avenue of storage provided through Apple… iPhoto. I am especially impacted since my older photos don’t have exif shooting date info stored in them. Without exif shooting date info iPhoto will use the created date from your photo. Unfortunately most of my old photos have a created date of 2008 since they came onto my Mac via a sidetrack through Linux. As an interim until I can go through 20,000 photos with a ruby script and set some dates I use Google’s Picasa which seems to work just fine.

What the software is really about is which of it do I use. Here’s a shortlist of my favorite apps: Ripit! - An app to rip my DVDs to .dvdmedia format. DVDRemaster - converts/exports .dvdmedia (and others) to .mov or .mp4v or whatever. From there I port it to my mobile devices. Acorn - Just enough digital media editing for me. Picturesque - Simple app to make my pictures a little glossier. Google Picasa - though not just a Mac app… I use it a lot. MoneyWell - Bucket budgeting at it’s best. Once I tried MoneyWell I had no desire to mess with quicken again. TextMate - The ultimate text editor Coconut Battery - Because you gotta know how your battery is doing. Adium - Because it’s free and it brings all my IM clients together. The only bad thing is video/audio conferencing is busted. Preview - Built-in and a nearly perfect viewing tool for pdf, image, and movie files. Time Machine - Built-in backup for your Mac. This has saved my life a couple times and Windows has NOTHING to compare with it.

The Hardware:

Since I’m not an engineer I cannot speak to the hardware quality and design of apple computers. I can only make observations about placement of the things I use on the computer and go from there. I will say up front that Apple is not the rip off people keep saying that it is. I did price shopping and found that by the time I had customized a respectable laptop (High Line Toshiba & Thinkpad) to match Apple’s offerings I was within 200 dollars or less. Getting off of Windows was easily worth 200 dollars to me.

The most hideous feature for me to have faced was the glidepad. I have always hated laptop glidepads because of the way my thumbs would ride on the touch surface and cause unexpected events like clicking buttons and links outside my actual working area. My Toshiba, IBM, and Dell experience always showed the touch pad was too close to the keyboard. On my MacBook Pro there is ample space between the keyboard and my glidepad so that accidental brushing is non existent. Additionally the single button on the glidepad rather than right&left clicks is a non issue for usability.

The keyboard is a dream to type on and that is quite a compliment coming from a Thinkpad user since the IBM flagship laptops are known for their smooth and comfortable keyboards. I was worried that there would be something about keystroke combinations on the Mac to make my life difficult but my fear was never validated.

Apple displays are wonderful. Initially I was a little bothered by the antialiasing that takes place with text on the Mac but it didn’t last long. Text and images on the Mac are beautifully smooth. Once you realize that “crispness” on your Windows display is actually pixelation and actually distortion then something like the Mac display becomes more of a draw. I find animation smoother on my MacBook Pro than it was on my Thinkpad but that probably becomes a little subjective due to the better graphics hardware in my MacBook.

Performance on my MacBook seems to be very good. I got a nice boost when I upgraded my 5400rpm drive to a 7200rpm Hitachi drive with faster i/o. As an aside my faster drive from Hitachi actually runs a lot cooler than the OEM drive and consumes less power. Though my MacBook Pro is not a “light” machine it is very comfortable to carry and use. There is a power button on the MacBook… but to be honest I can’t remember the last time I used it!

Closing out hardware… regardless of what value it adds (or not) to my laptop… the glowing apple is cool.

The Support

Support is where I hear the most whining from people with Apple products and I just haven’t had an experience to make me angry yet. I’m pretty nice to the Apple folks and don’t immediately assume they are mindless drones like most aggravated support posters do. I’m fairly self supporting so by the time I’ve gotten to the Apple Genius bar there has been a lot of googling and troubleshooting on my part. Typically they will want to do the same things I’ve already done and that’s fine with me since it becomes validating. Since I don’t have Apple support a lot of things come up my dime and their shop fees seem to be fair when I need to do something I’m uncomfortable with. If the price is too high for me I just politely let them know and drop it there. I’ll briefly mention that when my hard drive was full I went to them and there was no upgrade path for the HDD so I went outside to Other World Computing for some higher quality drives.

When I bought my MacBook it had lived a full year plugged in, never cycling the battery. I quickly found out that my battery life was about 20 minutes. I purchased a new one from the Apple Store which lasted about 10 months before I started seeing my computer shut down hard at about 12% battery; Apple replaced the battery for free since there is a 12 month warranty. I didn’t get that kind of coverage when my Thinkpad battery went out in 11 months. I didn’t get that kind of coverage when my Satellite Pro battery went out in 15 months with Toshiba’s 3 year Total Care package. Needless to say I was happy.

Perhaps the support coverage that won me over to Apple was when my video card went out. My second-hand MacBook Pro was 1.5 years old when I opened the screen one morning and it didn’t light up. Connecting a monitor resulted in the same result in a different place. I wasn’t really sure whether the machine had locked up or what so I tried to ssh in and had success… everything was running fine. I did a controlled restart through ssh and when my machine came back up the screen was still blank. A little Google searching revealed a flaw in Nvidia’s card which might be conditionally replaced FREE by Apple.

I qualified for the replacement but the machine would have to be shipped out to the depot in Arizona. I got a good time machine backup, purchased a “loaner” MacBook Pro and gave mine to the Apple Store for repair. In a couple weeks I got a call from the Apple Store; the guy told me the depot had disqualified my MacBook for repair because it didn’t have an OEM drive in it. I told the guy that was fine and that I would put the OEM drive back in and we could ship it back. I guess he had discovered that my replacement drive was far superior to the original because he told me he thought the depot’s findings were not fair and if I didn’t mind he’d like to fix it in the store. “Do I mind?” I chirped. “I’d be glad for you to save me the hassle of swapping drives out.”

Two weeks later when I got back into town from vacation my computer was ready. The fit and finish I had messed up replacing my drive was even fixed!

I’m good with Apple support so far.

My Closing Thoughts

The Mac quite frankly gave me a complete solution to all my computing needs… “It just works.” With Linux I had a development powerhouse that did a horrible job with photo manipulation, color printing, and video ANYTHING. I found myself swapping out my HDD on the ThinkPad so I could do graphics and audio stuff in WinXP Pro then shutting down so I could swap the drive out for Linux Development tools. Life was NOT harmonious for me. With the Mac I can print beautiful pictures to my photo printer. Apple’s hardware and software allow easy capture and rendering of my home movies. OSX is a great fit for my development needs since it is UNIX based. Life is just easier on a Mac.

I’m just a “common joe” who gingerly wandered into using a Mac. I wasn’t ready for the Mac until my professional programming needs clashed with my personal media needs. I don’t expect my Mac to remain viable any longer than my Linux or Windows computers but I bet they will.