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The Mac OS is back in the house!

Written by Marco Conti Sunday, 07 June 2009 22:32

A long, long time ago, my very first computer was a Macintosh Plus with 284K of memory, no hard drive (and no second diskette slot, something I envied newer Macs owners for) and a 2 inch screen... almost.

Then, in the early 90's I dropped $5K on a shiny new Mac and until 2002 the Mac was my primary machine. However, due to my corporate webmaster position, I always had a dual machine set up. Slowly but surely, my PC took the place of my Mac and when I started working on my own, my newest box was a PC and most of my software licenses were for PC. It was only natural that my next computer would be a PC.

I strongly believe that Web Developers should have as many platform and as much software as humanly possible. There is no telling what the next project is going to entail or what the next client's machine is going to be and we need to be prepared.

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Try 1Password. It even imports data from Roboform!

Sure, even Safari is available on PC and Macs can run windows. The lines are blurred. But just today I realized to my horror that my own website had a pretty serious mistake in Firefox for Mac that did not show up in any other browser.

But let's backtrack: for the past few years I worked on a PC and checked my work on an old Blue & White Mac G3. Increasingly, the "check my work" part went by the wayside. The poor candy colored computer just could not keep up with the software updates anymore. It just got too slow and old. Finally, I disconnected it from my KVM to avoid getting tempted to use it.

A couple of weeks ago I decided it had been too long. I needed a mac. I am starting work on a series of Screencasts on Joomla called "5 Minutes Joomla Tips" and I am writing a book on using Joomla with Adobe Dreamweaver to accelerate template design and code integration.

I figured that in the web design world (my most likely audience) there is a far larger percentage of Mac users than the already considerable one in the general computer world. If my screencasts were PC centric and I did not have the chance to try out my techniques on a Mac I was setting myself up for some serious embarrassment.

So I called a mail order company and I bought a shiny Mac Mini with a dual core and 3GB of RAM. Not the biggest screamer, but an adorable little machine.

I was really surprised at how powerful, stable and outright pretty the Mac os has become (my G3 experience didn't count). There is a lot to like in it.

There is also a lot to dislike. Granted, mostly minor things, but still quite annoying.

But what's there to like is really awesome. For instance, I had been trying to exchange data with my Samsung Phone for a while on my PC. Eventually I managed to connect, but only after many downloads, a lot of reading and a lot of grief.

Today I saw a flashing icon in the mac OS menu and I went to investigate (It makes me feel like a kid in a haunted house still...). Behold! The mac was asking me if I wanted to bluetooth my phone to it. I did and it did almost immediately.

I did try Bluetooth on the pc and it was a farse. Beeps, and clicks and screens and windows... an hour later I only succeeded in cluttering up my desktop and getting nowhere. But the Mac just simply hooked up.

You have got to love that.

Well, I am not one t twitter on my own blog with my life story. This is a serious blog for serious web designers. But in the next few weeks, as I get more familiar with the Mac, I will post my experiences and, most of all, you'll be able to see my mac in my upcoming screencasts.

I am almost there....