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After about 1 week of full time Mac use I’ve decided to switch back to PC.

There are two reasons why:

Latest MacBook Pro gets uncomfortably hot. The bottom is literally painful to the touch, and the top left side where hand rests when I type is too warm and causing my hand some uncomfortable pain after 5 minutes of typing.I can’t believe MacBook Pro is released with such horrendous heat issues. I find it’ physically uncomfortable to use the device.

Tools. TextMate is a fine editor, but I don’t see why people go all goo-goo-ga-ga over it. For Flash development nothing holds a candle to FlashDevelop. Sepy is good, but FlashDevelop code insight is extremely well done. For Rails work I prefer Aptana+RadRails, but since it’s available on OSX, it’s not a factor.

MySQL Admin GUI is missing half the features its Windows counterpart has.

SVN client – no alternative to TortoiseSVN. Subversion is a major pain to use on OSX.Flash 8 is very slow. In fact, it seems to be faster under Parallels.

Things that will miss:

Adium – best instant messenger I’ve ever used.

Speed. Some things are quite a bit faster on OSX. Full Noobkit database build takes 9 minutes on OSX vs 13 minutes on Windows (Core 2 Duo E6400 with 3 GB RAM). I think it’s because Windows doesn’t let a process to use both cores.

This is a response to The Apple approach (aka first impressions of the MacBook Pro) post by Antonio Cangiano. I started typing this in comments section on his blog first, but thought this would fit well into my own “Switching to Mac” series.

Antonio Cangiano writes:

Virtually everything that can be accomplished on a Mac with TextMate, when programming in Rails, can also be accomplished with a different OS (e.g. Linux), a different editor (Emacs, Vim, JEdit, etc…) or web technology (e.g. ASP.NET, J2EE, etc…). The problem is “how” you accomplish the end result, and what sort of effort, knowledge and time are required to do so.

I don’t feel my time is best spent excessively configuring and fiddling with the tools that are supposed to make me more productive.

It really amazes me that Rails “community” creates such a dependency on the Mac. How is Mac in any way a better Rails platform? I can very easily say “virtually everything that can be accomplished on a PC with Notepad”. I wouldn’t use Notepad, but RadRails (and now Aptana) has served me well. Mac itself offers absolutely zero over a PC as a Rails development platform. You don’t need a Mac to develop in Rails.

Configuring is another issue all together. Getting Rails stack going without “all in one packages” is actually much easier on Windows than it is on OSX. One click Ruby installer comes with RubyGems and you don’t need to install 1GB worth of development tools and then compile RubyGems for 20 minutes. Other development tools are one click installers as well.

The only reason why I personally decided to buy a Mac a week ago was because I wanted a better and lighter laptop than my monster Dell XPS M1710 and I knew that if I didn’t like OSX I can always go back to Windows without changing laptops. It’s very unfortunate that the only company which puts some effort in industrial deign.

I’ve been coding Rails since February this year on PC and feel absolutely no different on a Mac now. In fact, I find some OSX UI to be getting in the way of productivity, but that’s a personal preference issue.

I have installed Ruby and Rails and the whole stack. Sadly, I haven’t had a chance to do any Rails development after yet because I have to do some Flash development to pay for the Mac. Yes, I’m actually a full time Flash developer by day.

To continue with my series of “switching to mac” posts, here’s a list of applications that I have installed so far (in order that I have them bookmarked):

Freeware:

• Tomato Torren – Torrent client for OSX
• CocoaMySQL – a better MySQL GUI
• Linotype FontExplorer X – very good font management tool
• VirtueDesktops – virtual desktops.
• iTerm – better terminal application.
• Shiira Project – pretty browsing.
• MenuMeters – status LEDs for your Mac.
• Google Notifier for Mac – my replacement for calendar and email applications.
• La Chose – SVN client for OSX – um… SVN client, it’s better than shell.
• Aptana with RadRails – my favorite Rails IDE.
• Adium – amazing IM client.
• VLC – for a platform that pimps itself as “user friendly”, OSX sure lacks a way to view any media that’s not produced by Apple.
• Firefox – seems to be just as slow as on PC.

Shareware:

• Path Finder – because Finder blows.
• VMWare Fusion – seems much faster than Parallels.
• TextMate – I guess I should check out what’s all the fuss about.

I think this sums up a basic starter kit. Please let me know if I missed something.

Ever since I started doing Ruby for the most part instead of .NET I wanted to get a Mac. I always wanted to get a Powerbook, but never could because most of the work I was doing was for Windows. Now that this is no longer the case, I got myself a Mac Book Pro yesterday.

General impressions.

My Mac knowledge is about that of a “mother who uses computer for email and internet”. I’ve never spent any significant amount of time on one and no development experience at all.

This is my second day and so far I have mixed impressions. The thing that I hate the most so far is how lackluster window resizing in OSX is. That tiny little resize corner is the only way to resize a window. Often, it ends up being below the screen edge and becomes even more of a hurdle. Windows windows resizing is much better.

I was very pleasantly surprised by Adium. After 10 minutes it became clear that this is by far the best IM client I’ve ever used.

Finder is the second big disappointment. There are some major usability issues there. No tree view is the big one. Column view is nice, but would be even nicer with a tree view. Can’t mix column/list view with icon view.

Ruby on Rails impressions.

I’m really puzzled why Mac is the platform of “choice” for RoR development. I’m following along this guide and getting the stack set up is hell comparing to Windows. The fact that I need to install 1GB worth of developer libraries just to get to actually installing is nutty. The “sudo port install ruby rb-rubygems” command has been running for about 20 minutes now while I typed this entire post. My first time installing RoR stack on Windows took about 15 minutes all together: download Ruby, RubyGems, MySQL. Install both. Install Rails gem. Done. That was almost as easy as installing .NET

Anyways… port install is done now…