Steven S. Ross

I heard this questions at CFUnited last year when a fellow universal mind colleague was interrupted in his talk and I have been wanting to open up this can of worms. Not knocking all those folks out there using their windows boxes, just thought I’d share my experience.

Initially, I wanted to switch to a mac because I started playing with rails and a linux environment (although that is what I deploy to) it is not what I wanted to develop on. Reason why? It reminded me too much of windows. I still had to install drivers, deal with configuration issues, find applications that worked the way I wanted them to work and then keep up with the build release schedule and quirky desktop bugs. Linux is great for a server, no really, when you run a linux server you don’t touch it, you just set it loose and watch it work. Well you might have to rotate the log files but, there is always cron so, never-mind, I digress…

Back to it. It was a bit annoying at first to make the switch and yes I did have to buy some software. But, ya know what? Guess how many hours I have spent digging for new drivers or trying to fix some stupid dll problem or wanting to upgrade my drivers because I wanted the next feature? Zero, yep, zero. I also don’t reformat my machine to make sure it is running optimally, nor do I worry about viruses and spyware. I just read a blog post that if you spend 2 hours a week on running your virus & spyware programs then you have just used up 102 hours (a year) of time without doing anything. Factor that in with rebuilding a box, dealing with drivers and other windows headaches and I bet that goes up to at least 200 hours a year. Thats time wasted and time frustrated.

Workflow

This was the bonus of switching to the mac, my workflow has improved greatly, my machine doesn’t get in the way of me trying to do something. With features like expose and handy tools like quicksilver and growl I can just keep working while keeping up to date on stuff going on in the background. Also, I’ll tell you something I never thought of before, buying software becomes less painful. Yeah I know hard to admit, seems to me that windows users (myself included) have no problem borrowing software from other “sources”. Since I have owned a mac I have had no problem paying for software. Yeah that sounds bad but, its true. I’m less annoyed and more appreciative of the software that runs on my box and consequently I don’t have an issue buying it.

Education

Using my mac has become an education experience, I use the terminal and any software developer you know should too. This is because there are so many powerful things you can do with it. The great thing about the mac again is that it is built on top of a Unix style OS (Free BSD). Now this doesn’t mean that you can go hacking away at all the core features of OS X but, it does mean that for the most part it behaves pretty much like any other unix / linux OS. This is a good thing. Again your machine doesn’t get in the way as much. Checkout Macports.

Dealing with windows

Yes, I still deal with windows and windows servers, and you know what? I don’t mind and I don’t have to boot a windows virtual machine to make it all work. I simply fire up Cord which lets me term services into any windows server. Also, did I mention it is free?

Well back to work and I’m looking forward to the next release of OS X, ordered it today. Check it out at Apple