As I alluded to last week, my Macbook Pro came and it is wonderful. Like I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’m worse than an 8 year old on Christmas Eve when I’m waiting for new computer gear to arrive. Most of my morning at work consisted of me doing a task, then refreshing the tracking page to see if my MBP had been delivered yet. Finally, about 2 in the afternoon it showed up.
Now that I’ve had the chance to make my “the switch,” I decided to weigh in with my thoughts so far. Overall, it’s good. Very good! I will admit, I’m by far not your typical person who would switch from Windows to Mac. The primary reason for wanting a Mac was for virtualization. It’s the only piece of hardware that can (legally) run OS X, Windows, and Linux all at the same time; A web developers dream.
That dream doesn’t come true out of the box though. First you need to get Parallels, the app that does the virtualization. With it, I was able to get Windows XP (and Vista — just because I haven’t spent much time with it) installed and running in virtual sessions. Ubuntu wasn’t so easy though. I thought I got it installed a few times, but it would never boot right (it hung or would continuously reboot) or the install would fail before I even got to that point. I decided that was OK because we aren’t as quite concerned about our app looking good in Linux.
Being the good little Ruby on Rails developer I am, I decided to check out TextMate. My initial reaction was “that’s it?” I later learned that TextMate’s killer feature (besides being a lightweight text editor with synatx highlighting and project management) is it’s keyboard shortcuts. They’re modules of their own. That means, each language has it’s own set of shortcuts. Until I learn them, I’ll be sticking to RadRails.
Installing Ruby on Rails itself, however, has been quite the challenge. I followed the HiveLogic guide which was recommended by just about everyone and it got me going for the most part. I didn’t follow the pieces on installing LightTPD or the FCGI stuff because I’m using Mongrel and Webrick. Over the weekend I thought that was the problem, but I figured out today that part of my problem was not having subversion installed. Now, my problem is that Rails drops it’s MySQL connection every few requests. I’ve narrowed it down to Ruby’s MySQL bindings, but haven’t been able to get it all playing nice yet.
Overall, working with a Mac is pretty much working on a PC (at least for what I do) with a little better interface and some nice bells and whistles. It’s a pretty damn slick piece of hardware to show off as well! A PC just doesn’t provoke the same response. I can see where the “it just works” phrase comes from, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the case for me. I’m still a little ways away from my dream development environment, but after spending some time with it, I’ll get everything singing in unison.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention the best thing about my new Mac yesterday. It came with double the memory and 50% more hard drive than I ordered it with. Figure this one out. The order page said it had 512MB of memory and an 80GB hard drive. The packing slip confirmed this. The little sticker under the battery even has those same numbers. But shortly after pulling my little gem out of it’s box, I noticed it was sporting 1GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive. I don’t mind one bit because it would’ve cost the company another $100 for the upgrade. The only problem is the 2GB of additional RAM we ordered from a 3rd party already showed up. That means it’s going to cost us a 15% restocking fee to send back the extra RAM.
I want one…
You won’t touch an iPod, Rick, but you’d get a Mac notebook? Hypocrite!
The difference is that a Macbook is well designed and bitchin’. Whereas iPods are not well designed, just ubiquitous in the MP3 player market.
quoth the rick: “iPods are not well designed”
Where the fuck does that come from? It’s the best design in the world, and most intuitive interface. (if you don’t take that as fact, I’d be willing to qualify with: “… that I have ever seen.”) Rivaled only by the 256MB Rio 800 I had way back when 256MB was plenty, and 6GB Nomads were insanely huge (yet crappy to operate).
The interface, yes, is well designed, but from an overall product design standpoint, it sucks. Take these things, for example:
1) The shuffle algorithm blows. It often repeats the same subset of songs. It doesn’t adequately randomize what you listen to.
2) The firmware is stored ON THE HARD DRIVE. This is a design no-no. This is why you often have problems with firmware corruption if you accidentally disconnect the iPod from your computer at an inopportune time. Any commercial piece of hardware of this kind should have the firmware on a separate chip to keep from corruption of this nature.
3) You can’t change the batteries yourself (or aren’t supposed to) but instead have to have an Apple store person do it for a ridiculous fee.
4) Limitation of the iTunes software as the only way to transfer music.
5) This list goes on, but these are some of the most egregious items.
Welcome to the club, Jared! I hope you enjoy your new toy =). Almost time for me to get a new one too…a job would be good first, though. Happy Holidays.
RE: My last post: I think I mis-spoke, I believe it was a 192MB Rio 900.
1) That simply illustrates just HOW RANDOM it is…. Not how un-random. There is also a setting to set how likely it is to hear from the same artist twice, thus making it seem more random, and making people happier.
2) Your strongest valid point. However, I haven’t had much problem with it.
3) But you can… And the battery life is a lot better than you’d ever get with AAA’s, and keeps the physical size down, and keeps the asthetic much cleaner.
4) Boohoo. At least you’re not limited to WiMP, or worse yet, limited to a single OS like windoze.
5) Good call, we’ll stop there.
BTW Rick, did you buy a zune yet?
1) You make no sense. It illustrates how the algorithm isn’t robust enough to keep from re-using segments of supposedly randomized data. Go read up on randomization algorithms before you even pretend to know what you’re talking about.
2) My roommate had problems with it and it was a bitch.
3) No, Average Joe User cannot change it him/herself. Nerds will buy battery kits, yes, but everyday consumer Billy has to go to Apple and have them do it.
4) I’d have the same argument about an MP3 player tied to any particular piece of software. Good MP3 players let you simply drag and drop your music onto it, not go through some horrible software interface.
5) No Zune for me. The Zune software blows just as hard. I’ll stick to my $150 40 GB Toshiba, thank you.
I think the jury is still out on the shuffle algorithm. Humans have a tendancy to look for patterns where they don’t exist. Hell, QCD often plays 2-3 songs by the same artist when I have it on random.
And I beg to differ about the user battery swap. I did it and it wasn’t very hard at all. The instructions were very clear and I don’t really see how you could goof up the process unless you’re being unnecessarily heavy-handed.