The 30 day OSX challenge begins

Posted June 11th, 2010 in OSX

I posted a couple of days ago that I was going to buy a Mac Mini and do a "30 day OSX Challenge". After buying it that same day and spending the last couple of days setting up all the software I need, I switched off my Windows 7 desktop PC last night and don't intend switching it on again for (at least) 30 days. (With the exception of switching it on for my wife to connect to the VPN at her office three mornings a week, which sadly may not be possible with OSX).

Reason for the switch

I need to be able to start testing websites for the iPhone and iPad but do not want to have to buy either. Fortunately Apple makes an iPhone/iPad simulator available as part of their free to download iPhone SDK. Unfortunately it only works on OSX, so after some amount of thought I decided I'd buy a cheap little Mac Mini and use that for testing.

I did think about just getting an iPod Touch and using that for testing, but then I still wouldn't have been able to test at iPad screen resolutions, and as new versions of the OS become available I'd need to buy more iPod Touches to be able to test on multiple versions of the OS. So a Mac Mini it was.

Reason for the 30 day challenge

I figured that I've got this nice little box to play around with and I can run pretty much all my apps on it (or very similar equivilents) so why bother running a Mac and a Windows box? I run multiple virtual machines in VMWare anyway for testing different versions of Internet Explorer so it's no different whether I do this from an OSX host or a Windows host.

And anyway, my development environment was the wrong way around when you think about it: you can virtualize Windows on OSX, but not the other way around. (At least not legally and not very easily).

I'm not a complete Mac/OSX noob

I have used various versions of both the Mac Classic and OSX operating systems (albeit not full time on a day to day basis) so I'm not starting from scratch learning a new interface entirely. And anway they are all just operating systems and not really all that different at the end of the day; it's the apps that are important after all.

First impressions

So this is day 1 although I have effectively been using my Mac Mini for a couple of days as I get everything set up and copied over. I'm impressed so far; the interface is a lot slicker and nicer than in previous versions I've used (I'm glad they got rid of that hideous striped background in apps) and the only issue I'm really finding so far is getting used to different keyboard combinations.

I can see already that I'm pretty unlikely to go back to a PC because there just doesn't seem to be any point. I can test everything much better from a Mac and all the software I need (or very similar/better equivilents) is also available for OSX.

Anyway, that's all for now. I won't bore my regular readers with any further posts about this switch until a bit later down the track when I look at what apps I'm now using compared with what I was using before on Windows.