L. Mihalkovic

Switching to a Mac

A couple years ago, and after many years being a faithful Windows and Linux user, I finally made the switch to a Mac. A friend of mine working for the Clusters Sun been telling me how convenient it was for him to use a Mac for all his work even compared to Linux (13 years ago I was trying to convince him that Linux was more than a toy, but like many die-hard BSD fans, he never thought so).

First I got a Mac mini… a quick and painless way to start with a very minimum financial commitment. As most of my work still had to do with Linux, I quickly became addicted to parallels. Within a few month, I got tired of wheeling around my ‘laptop’ (one of those Alienware/Sager/Clevo monsters with housing an overheating 3.4Ghz prescott p4), and bought a MacBook. There were talks that the Pro was soon to be updated, so the thought was that as soon as it became available, I would give the mini to my daughter (only a few months old at the time, but already showing some interest for keyboards and winnie the pooh), and the MacBook to my wife, while I would move up to a MacBook Pro.

At the time, all my programing was in Java/C/C++/Perl/Shell, so Eclipse was a no brainer. It became quickly apparent that despite being a very convenient OS, Tiger was not without its own share of annoyances. Chief among them was the frailty of Mail.app and its incredible lack of maturity for an application that has been around in some way shape or form for the better part of 10 years (back to the Next days). Once past the excitement of the first hour, smart mailboxes are actually quite limited, and the team probably delegated the design of the mail tagging feature to a toddler: ‘now its marked, now its not’ (abysmally stupid if you ask me).

And then there was Java…