November 21, 2003
Diary of a switcher #8
Phew. It's been a frantic couple of days installing, configuring, and generally trying to get the Mac up and running while at the same time frenetically developing on the other laptop. I think it's been worth it.
It's true what they say about the Mac "just working". Aside from a couple of obvious mistakes that I already knew about but made anyway (for example, swapping networks while using network drives caused a three-way race between Mail, Finder and "umount" which forced me to reboot), the Mac has been rock-solid. The extra memory (1GB) is definitely paying off too - I have several things running at the same time (see screenshot), and it just keeps on motoring along.
Quite a few software packages have made it onto the powerbook either because they form part of my regular development environment or because they've become indispensible in my time playing with the ibook. Here's what's installed so far:
- Eclipse (development environment, a customised OS X package by Stefano, via Jeremy)
- NetNewsWire (RSS aggregator for reading news / weblogs)
- XChat Aqua (IRC client so I can keep up with the luddites who don't have iChat)
- PostgreSQL and XIndice (databases, used by various projects)
- OpenOffice.org (the Free word processor/presentation/spreadsheet etc)
- JEdit (text editor)
- SubEthaEdit (distributed text editor)
- SSH Agent
- Windows Media Player
- Goliath (WebDAV client)
... and various other bits and pieces that I'll list at a later time.
Some negative observations:
- The case is not as ergonomic as it could be. I'm finding my wrists are getting raw from the very angular edges - all my previous laptops have had curved edges at the front.
- This thing gets REALLY warm - thankfully the heat is expelled at the back and the bottom, so it's not as uncomfortable to type on as the old laptop (which used to cook your fingers), but it's almost too hot to sit on your lap.
- Java and CPU-intensive stuff seems a bit slow - 18 minutes to compile a clean checkout of cocoon, for example. On the 2.4Ghz P4 laptop, it took significantly less time. I guess there's a trade-off to be made: usability vs. raw power. Hopefully I'll gain time spent in compiling elsewhere.
Oh, and I'm pleased to say that Mail works absolutely fine now, so looks like my problems with Jaguar's Mail and IMAP were just down to an unhappy conflict of software.
Posted by savs at November 21, 2003 6:48 PM