I Bought A Mac


I have always been a long time PC user and developer on the PC platform and recently made the switch to a Mac. Throughout my entire life I have owned desktop PCs and PC laptops, even though I have used Macs and am familiar with them, I have never owned one. Late last year I began considering switching to a MacBook Pro as my primary development platform.

The development that I do is in .Net, Java, and C++. All three are developed on a PC running the various variants of Microsoft Windows operating systems. When Apple introduced the MacBook Pro in February 2006, I seriously began to think about switching from PC to Mac as my primary machine.

To switch to the MacBook Pro as a development environment for PC Windows based projects, specifically .Net I needed a way of running Visual Studio. Microsoft had not yet decided to port Visual Studio to OS X. If they did do so, there would be quite a few developers who would be willing to purchase it (myself included). Although this would be an interesting scenario and expansion of Microsoft’s development lineup, it would not be more than a dream on my part.

There were two choices that I could use running a .Net environment on a MacBook Pro: install and run Windows XP by booting directly; or run Windows XP on a virtual machine. I knew that I could use Boot Camp as an option (http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/) but did not want to have to reboot the system every time I needed to open Visual Studio. The other option was to use Parallels Desktop and run the environment virtually. I was apprehensive of the performance I would experience while running .Net under a virtual instance of WinXP, but I decided to go ahead and try. If it didn’t work I could download Boot Camp and run .Net through a native instance of WinXP.

The Mac purchase experience inside of an Apple Store is vastly different than within a Best Buy, Circuit City or CompUsa. Apple has targeted the Apple Stores to clearly be a boutique shopping experience, with ample examples of their products on display for users to try before buying. The sales associate that I met was a little taken aback by the fact that I knew exactly what I wanted.

The purchase went smoothly and I took delivery of a base model MacBook Pro and retail copy of Parallels Desktop. Installing Parallels went smoothly and after installing WinXP and Visual Studio, I was able to open a project that I am working and compile it with no incident.

.Net on Mac works…now if only Microsoft would come out with Visual Studio for the Mac and a .Net framework.

Google Office Suite

Google has released a Premiere Edition of the popular we based applications costing $50 per account per year. This service which contains the similar features found within a desktop application such as: spreadsheet, word processor, calendar and mail has a storage space of 10GB of email storage. The launch made me begin thinking about how much we already operate in an interconnected world and to speculate as to what the future would be for such a world.

The model for the distributed application harkens back to the days of mainframes and dumb terminals. The mainframe terminal model would force the application to reside within a mainframe, and minimal to no processing would take place on the terminal. This allowed the expensive cost of computing power, application operation to stay within the big iron of the mainframe.

As the cost of the computer hardware began to decline and the PC began to spread to the desktop, so did the applications. The application no longer stayed on the mainframe, but moved to the desktop and the low cost PCs. The mainframe now was slowly moving to the background. When I read about the Google Office Suite the move is back toward dumb terminals and servers that store the applications and data.

I do not think that the Google model is bad. There are some instances were it would be a good thing to have in place: universities, and individuals who do not wish to invest in an expensive software applications. The best way to illustrate the benefits of the Google service would be to look a small to medium sized company.

A company with a few dozen employees may not have the ability to hire a dedicated IT employee. What will usually happen in these companies is that one employee will assume the role of help desk and IT network manager. This is not the ideal solution. Some companies solve their IT needs by hiring a consultant to allow them to have IT services but without the expense of a dedicated employee.

Google’s Office Suite allows companies another solution. They can use the office suite to reduce their IT costs, and since it is a fixed office location the application works perfectly for them. An internet connection would still be required, but with business Internet connectivity available for as low as $50/month this is far cheaper than multiple licensed copies of Office. This is not the ideal solution for a company that has people consistently traveling though. Those workers will still need the ability to travel and work disconnected from the office.