Tell me about the Apple Macintosh

[recipher]

Ok. I'm a PC guy. I've been a .NET developer since before it was even called .NET (it was called NGWS before that - prizes* for anyone who can tell me what that stood for). Before that I worked with VB and ATL. Before that it was Borland C then C++. I've been using Windows XP since 2000, during one of the first betas, and then all 3 (or was it 2?) release candidates.

I've never owned a Mac.

But now, I'm seriously thinking about it. I'm using the excuse that I'd like to check that my company's new web-based application (written using .NET 1.1 / C# and SQL 2000) works in IE/Mac and Safari (and what's the other one? begins with a 'c'). But I'm intrigued certainly. It'd be nice to play with some new tech before Longhorn.

So... what do I need to know. What should I get? Mac Mini? Powerbook? Power Mac? Who's got what?

What about software? What comes out of the box. What's good?

Go on, enthuse me. Before I change my mind.

* Not actual prizes but certainly an appreciation of a job well done.

[Ginger Tosser]

Next Generation Windows Services

Sorry can't help you with macs, but the general consensus is there are superb, never crash, look good etc. I'd get one myself as my primary PC, however there is a piece of software i use which isn't on the mac (VMWare).

I've always liked the look of the Mini Mac, but i've heard of issues with. Also Apple seem to not people doing things to the Mini, if you want to upgrade the memory they have to do it.

[Ish]

I've got a similar history to you by the sounds of it. Been working almost exclusively on MS platforms for about 10 years until a year ago (when I shifted all my home stuff to Linux) - still work with C# at work so to speak. I was also pretty much a Mac Virgin before this last weekend

But I bought a PowerBook (15" one, 1.5GHz G4, gig of ram) at the weekend having been won over by using a friends.

Fantastic. So so so easy to use. Beautiful design - hardware and software. Rock solid. Great build quality. Lasts for ages on battery. Full of neat features (I love the way the keyboard backlight comes on automatically when it gets dark and the screen dims). Blah blah blah.

Based on my 5 days with it so far I can't recommend them enough to be honest. Go and play with one running Mac OS X, open a tonne of windows, hit F9 - you'll want to buy one

Software I'm running (other than the out the box stuff) is Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Photoshop, FireFox, SubEthaEdit, The Gimp, NewsFire, Civilisation 3, and World of Warcraft. Also started to fiddle with the Apple development tools and Mono is downloading at the moment.

Out the box it had the Safari web browser, the apple mail client, iPhotos, iTunes, some movie editing software, etc. Normal kind of out the box stuff to be honest.

Its running on my wireless network and sorted itself out (so to speak) pretty much all by itself.

[FreelancePolice]

im with ish too, ive been doing some java programming on mine and found it to be relatively stable and quick. Osx is awesome and i can't recommend it enough, plus you'd be surprised at the amount of mac software alternatives for some pc only things

Osx tiger is out tomorrow and that looks superb me and 5 friends are thinking of splitting the 5 license copy between us (no idea how legal that is though :/ )

[recipher]

Mono

Ooh. I'd completely overlooked the fact that Mono would run on OS X. Is there a decent IDE anywhere?

[recipher]

Next Generation Windows Services

Good work.

[Wild_Cat]

Eclipse (which runs just fine on OS X) has a Mono plugin, according to http://www.gotmono.com/docs/ide/eclipse.html

As the others say, if it's going to be your first Mac and you intend to do some (at least semi-)serious coding on it, get a Powerbook. The 15" one is a beauty.

I've been using a first-generation 12" AlBook (G4-867, 640 megs of RAM) for the last 2 years, and I love it. However, it's beginning to show its limits: Eclipse is a tad slow, and World of Warcraft is a tad too much for the poor 32-meg graphics card to handle. I'll probably get myself a Power Mac as soon as I return to France.


In the meantime, I'll be getting Tiger tomorrow. I think what you're doing is perfectly legal, Freelancepolice. You're buying 5 OS X licenses, which grants you the right to install and use OS X on 5 computers. Dividing them up among 5 people who each own a computer doesn't look illegal in any way to me.

(in fact, I'd probably be doing the same if only I knew 4 other Mac owners living near my place )

[marcus]

A friend of mine is selling a 2 (maybe 3) year old Ibook for ?350, I was gona say no till I read all these glowing reviews. Im a mac virgin too

[FreelancePolice]

ahh excellent,i shall be ordering tiger later then

marcus and recip i can't recommend them enough for general computer usage. Obviously warcraft is a bonus in my book

[Lebowski]

ive got a 4 year old imac 500mhz g3 at home and its still going strong (when they say they build them strong there not wrong) not had a problem with it since day one and i still use it on a daily basis but mainley for a itunes jukebox web browser type thing.

Id recomned a imac g5 or a tower im a Graphic/Web designer and have just got a G5 tower for work and its fantastic piece of kit, the only real downside people come up with is that you cant play games on them and there a bit pricey,

apart from games software is not really an issue i have had a problem with, 9.99% of times if you can do something on a pc there is an app that will do it just as good on a mac.

[Paleface]

Re: IDE/Mono; Panther/Tiger come with XCode, which is a development IDE. You'll probably need to learn some ObjectiveC along the way, but not that much. XCode can be used to develop almost anything in any language, and it lets you package stuff up, etc, like a real Cocoa app. Kits like PyObjC let you hook an Interface Builder-built interface through ObjectiveC hooks to an app written in Python.

There's *lots* of support for developers out of the box. It is, after all, a form of BSD (Darwin) under the hood. So it comes by default with Perl 5.8, a decentish version of Python, an OK version of Ruby, XCode and the optional Developer Tools. Everything you can get at through the GUI you can do through a terminal (which, iirc, defaults to tcsh. Or maybe bash, I forget). Oh, and it has Apache built in, which you can turn on with a single click.

Out of the box, with any new mac, you get the OS (which has far more little "apps" than Windows), iLife 05, and maybe iWork05. iTunes and iPhoto 5 are great; Safari's a great browser, and I like mail.app.

You can see what you get on apple.com - look at what's included with each product and then look up the individual pages for them, eg apple.com/ilife, apple.com/macosx . Lots of details, but in short: you get a ton out of the box.

Forget IE/Mac, incidentally, it's a dead horse; hasn't been updated since c.1998 and a nightmare for any standards compliance. Not even sure if new Macs shipping with Tiger will come with IE any more. Safari is fine, and Firefox, Camino and Omniweb are the other driving forces in Mac browsers.

Regarding stuff like Mono, etc; someone, somewhere, will be compiling it for OSX; you might have to hunt around, that's all.

[recipher]

Nice one. Thanks.

I'm not intending to do any real development with it. Maybe just play about with Mono. I've had a search and there seems to be a bit of a community.

Camino. That's the fella. I'm a Firefox devotee. Our web application is strict standards only, IE/Win is b0rked at the moment (though not by much). I'll drop IE/Mac from the list and check out Safari and Camino (and OmniWeb) compliance.

[Ish]

There's *lots* of support for developers out of the box. It is, after all, a form of BSD (Darwin) under the hood. So it comes by default with Perl 5.8, a decentish version of Python, an OK version of Ruby, XCode and the optional Developer Tools. Everything you can get at through the GUI you can do through a terminal (which, iirc, defaults to tcsh. Or maybe bash, I forget). Oh, and it has Apache built in, which you can turn on with a single click.

Yeah I was really surprised (and impressed) with just how much developer support there is and for free.

So... you reckon your going to be splashing out recipher?

[recipher]

We'll see how we go. I'll wait 'til I've got a bit of cash in my business account, then I might get one for the "business".

[Jushin-Thunder-Liger]

Probably worth pointing out for techy types that MacOS is basically just BSD Unix with a Mac Gui.
Its a world class OS both front end and back
It comes with php/MySQL out of the box doesnt it?