During the vacation, we stopped in small bookstore in Verona which was selling computer software as well. At the entrance, there was a poster showing smiling Finder's face, Apple logo and announcing reasons why you would want to make the big jump - il grande salto - to Mac platform. That is to explain the title :-)
Grande Salto is exactly what I did. Without too much preparation or notice. Since Tuesday evening I am happy owner of the beautiful piece of hardware (17 inch 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro with 250 GB HDD and 4 GB of RAM) that is greatly complemented by the amazing software collection (OS X 10.5, iLife 08, iWork 08 and many others) running on it. I spent Wednesday playing with it and between 'Wows' and 'Ahhs' managed to setup the core applications I need for work: several configurations of Eclipse (with and without MyEclipseIDE), Netbeans with Ruby, couple of gems and of course THE editor. Then transferred the sources, installed Ant, Spring, Tomcat and couple of opensource packages (e.g. Jakarta Commons). And on Thursday, I jumped right into the field, to the client continuing in development of my current Java project in the place where I left it on Monday with Fujitsu N5100 running XP-ProSP2. As a plan B, I had my old notebook also with me - but did not have to resort to using it.
The combination of 17" screen with Leopard's visual appeal is pure beauty.
Unlike assumed, the Leopard does NOT (yet) come preinstalled on hard disk. There is a DVD which will install it. I have decided to erase everything and start from scratch. The install took about 45 minutes and had zero problems. The only confusing part was that after erasing harddrive you also erase iLife and need to reinstall it. On the Web site, Apple shows an image of two DVD's - Leopard and iLife'08. There is however no iLife install DVD in the package.
Since the big meow on Friday, lot of unhappy people had been talking and blogging about how terrible and unacceptable is the absence of the Java 6 from the Leopard. Some post were sounding very dramatic "I would not buy Mac if I only knew ..." - which is a bit silly. The Leopard's 300 new features were posted and touted and hyped for two weeks. Some of the "great" improvements were actually fairly modest improvements - so it was OBVIOUS that Java 6 is not going to be included because it would definitely make the list. QED.
With latest iTunes update, quite silently, a very nice new feature appeared. Apple started to offer for download lectures from many universities, with wide selection of topics: from environment through politics to mathematics and computer science. Most of the lectures are videos, but you will find also audio tracks - albeit for some topics, audio is quite problematic. Can you imagine doing e.g. differential equations in audio-only ?
The best feature - the lectures are free downloads. See more details here or on iTunes.
Thanks to exploring the Google calendar (when playing with public calendars related to Ottawa) I found the Ottawa Mac User group's calendar and discovered that
a) they exist
b) they hold monthly meetings in nice Irish pub at the Market The group is actually named Bytown Mac User's group, for the reasons explained on the Web site or here.
So I decided to go there. I thought - what the heck, worst thing that can happen that I will have a glass of Guinness at the pub I never visited before, which is not a bad thing at all. And besides, the Rideau Chapters store is very close (the plan B). It turned out pretty well, though - meeting was interesting. The group is fairly small (I believe somewhere about 10-15 people) but nice, friendly, dedicated and interesting. It sort of reflects the Mac representation in the market. Unlike when attending Microsoft users events, where almost everybody is by profession tied to the software development of IT business, here larger percentage of people did something non-primarily computer related for living - like creative writing, art, video processing. Again - it represents well the real world situation. Not too many people that actually do software development (other than Web design) but there was one guy who is exploring the same path as I am looking for: Objective C and Cocoa development.
I found out by accident that the famous Get a Mac ads exists in many versions:
Some nations have their own actors
http://www.apple.com/uk/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/jp/getamac/ads/
Other have only just language version of Long && Hodgman act
http://www.apple.com/de/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/fr/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/it/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/es/getamac/
The Austria and German speaking part of Switzerland are using German version of the ads (no surprise there) - http://www.apple.com/chde/getamac/ - and the francophone part of Switzerland uses the French version. As it looks like, Italian and Romansch speaking Swiss do not count :-(
From today's Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld 2007:
"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. "
Wayne Gretzky
I guess everybody is going to write about iPhone - which is OK because it is indeed very interesting gadget and it stole the show. To bad it will be 6 more months until it will be available in the US and (my best hopes) 8-9 months to have it here in Canada.
My daughter's music CD for her skating short program got badly scratched and because it was the last-but-one copy (as skater you need many copies, in case you loose/forget/scratch/misplace it), I was confronted with the task to create a new copy. Rather than starting Nero on Win-XP notebook, I have decided to learn (finally) how to do it on Mac. It must be simple, intuititive and much easier than on Windows. Right ? Wrong ! To my big surprise, there was no easy, idiot proof, very obvious way mac-ish drag and drop way how to acomplish it. It was not exactly hard either, but it actually took consulting the omniviscent Google to find it out. To save the search for the next time, I'll write it down. Here is what you have to do:
It's been almost 5 months now since I started to use Mac OS-X. During these months, I became very comfortable in the new environment and albeit I do not consider being a power user, I can do all I need with my Macbook and use it daily.
Today I found out that yet another from my friends got a Mac. Great news, Thomas - hope you will enjoy your Macbook Pro as much as myself, Gabo and many others. Welcome in the club.
See also Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V
This Mac thing seems to be quite contagious. Gabo started to seriously considering buying the MacBook, after listening to my happy stories about Great Mac Discoveries. Even Vlad, right now living trough his latest love-affair with Ubuntu Linux was deeply impressed with OS-X after we seeing Expose, Spotlight, PhotoBooth and iPhoto in action.
Next day, after I arrived to the office in the morning, Gabo was already there. Which is not unusual. Since his little son and wife are back, they get up quite early in the morning and Gabo usually beats me to arrive first to work. He lives only 5 minutes away anyway ...