2718.us blog » winxp http://2718.us/blog Miscellaneous Technological Geekery Tue, 18 May 2010 02:42:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 The Argument for a Mac http://2718.us/blog/2008/04/10/the-argument-for-a-mac/ http://2718.us/blog/2008/04/10/the-argument-for-a-mac/#comments Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:16:53 +0000 2718.us http://2718.us/blog/?p=13 I have about as many WinXP machines as OS X machines around here (and a few OpenBSD boxes, but that’s beside the point), and yet I find it’s rare that I touch anything other than the Macs anymore.  Why?  Well, I suspect it’s the same reason I keep seeing little things here and there that suggest developers are increasingly working on Macs–if I want a Mac program, well, duh, I’m on a Mac; if I want a PC program, I’ve got Parallels, so I don’t even have to deal with dual-booting; if I want a ‘nix machine, I just look under the Mac GUI and there’s a BSD-type ‘nix (oh, and OS X can run a standard X11 server, too).  I can use virtually any tool out there and work in all three worlds with one machine.  I no longer need to have two or three machines on my desk at home, just my Mac desktop.  I probably won’t be taking more than one laptop on the road with me anymore (I have travelled with two on several occasions in the past), just my Mac laptop.

Why do I want all these different facets?  Well, much as I hate to use it, damn near everyone in “the business world” uses Microsoft Office, and the Mac versions suck (I don’t know about 2008, but I’m not optimistic) and I’d rather use the PC version (2003, since 2007 is a disaster best described as MS openly giving the finger to all its customers).  Graphics work and page layout are in various Adobe Creative Suite products under OS X (I suppose that there exist PC versions, but really, who does graphics work on a PC?).  I also prefer web and email on the Mac side.  Then, when I have to deal with network/server/etc. stuff, I dive into terminal and I’m off.  For actual programming, while I love using WinSCP + TextPad under Windows, LOVE it, I tend more toward Transmit + Komodo Edit nowadays (this is largely a side effect of having a huge project hosted on a server that only supports FTP, not SFTP, and for whatever reason, WinSCP can’t seem to maintain a stable FTP connection with that server, so editing led to all sorts of nasty corruption and whatnot when the connection would drop mid-edit).

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that my day job is in an all-Mac office.

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