32 days of OSX

Posted July 12th, 2010 in OSX

32 days ago I began my "30 day OSX challenge" after buying a MacMini so I could use the iPhone and iPad simulators, as well as for once being able to test websites on a Mac. I had decided that because I'd bought this shiny new box I should really give OSX a go and have used it as my main computer since then.

Reasons for the switch etc

Read my previous two posts titled "The 30 day OSX challenge" and "The 30 day OSX challenge begins" for more details about why I decided to do this etc.

Note that while I was using Windows 7 as my primary computer before the switch I did spend several years running Linux on my main desktop with KDE as the desktop environment. It's not the operating system that's important to me so much; it's what tools I can run and how productive I can be using said operating system.

I had moved away from Linux due to too many issues running software and hardware and just couldn't really be bothered with all the messing around anymore, but I did still run a virtualized Linux environment for running my webserver development environment and all the web servers I run have a Linux variant on them (the older ones CentOS, the newer ones Debian).

Conclusions from the switch over

I don't really see any point in going back to using Windows; I can do everything I did on Windows at least as well, and get the added advantage of being able to run the iPhone/iPad simulators and can still run Windows virtualized for testing IE and other browsers natively on Windows.

And the GUI runs on top of *NIX based goodness so I get built in terminal access and Apache/MySQL running on a very similar platform to my production environments. So it's all good.

The only real issue I'm suffering is the one most Windows users have when switching to a Mac: my fingers are so well trained for Windows shortcut key combinations that I'm still getting it wrong sometimes but it's still early days yet.

The main issue I have is with the Home/End keys. I know they can be re-programmed using the excellent DoubleCommand utility but I've found when making home and end work the same as Windows/Linux then they make Firefox go back and forward in the history. After losing some content I'd being working on one too many times in FF I disabled PC style home and end keys again.