About 3 months ago I wouldn’t have dreamed about writing an article like this. But it is true. I really did make a complete switch to Apple. It has honestly been a lot less painful than I thought it would be. Here’s the reason and the results of my conversion.

At the beginning of the year I rushed out and purchased Windows Vista. Oh how excited I was. After days and days of getting all my hardware to work with it, I finally had it all up and running just the way I wanted it. I was first excited about the little gadget bar that I found on the side of my monitor (don’t ask why, I just like helpful utilities like that). I also noticed that setting it up with IIS was a lot more easier although still had a bit of a learning curve. The windows media center thing was pretty nice as well. I could now record all the TV shows I wanted. These things were all great and all, however, I noticed the basic use of Vista hadn’t really changed from XP. My day to day operations of my computer were pretty much exactly the same. No speed increase (you actually need a faster computer in order to run Vista), no real time saving thing about it really. Well anyways, I thought I had the best OS that I could find on the planet.

I had originally thought that Mac’s were for designers and PC’s were for developers. Then I met Mr. OSX and had what I would call a rebirth in the computer industry. I had an ibook for about a year mainly just for testing purpose. I didn’t like the low resolution display and slowness of it for regular use. So anyways, when I was starting to get tired of Vista for its boringness and complexity of doing the complex things I soon learned about an OSX only program called Textmate. I decided to install it on my ibook and did a small Flash Development job with it. I fell in love with it as I had with sepy about a year or so earlier. Textmate seems like the most customizable coding application I’ve ever worked with. It even has customizable macro’s which you can just record certain things you do regularily and setup key commands for them. I loved it. Besides Textmate I also discovered some wonders of OSX that I hadn’t known before. It seemed to be extremely customizable but not only that it was just so simple to do anything. If you plug in a device, it just works, you don’t need to install a driver. It’s System Preferences are so easy to work with. I really love how you can set it so you click the 3rd mouse button to reveal all the windows; I guess thats called Expose. It makes working with tons of applications at once a snap.

So I was sold, I then found a 3 month old 17″ MacBook Pro display item for $500 off the retail price and bought it. I’ve been using it ever since as my primary computer. I had some issues with certain fonts not working on the mac, but that’s ok because I still have my PC which I pull out of sleep mode on rare occasions, mainly just for font issues or to rip out a quickbooks invoice. I had since learned that OSX comes with PHP and Apache installed. I was in heaven when I found that out. I now have the latest PHP, Apache and mySQL installed on my computer so its a snap to do any local server-side developing. Also, I managed to setup my ibook as a server and routed a domain to it kinoliclients.com, where I can post all my sites in progress to. It’s nice to be able to work on Apache instead of IIS since most servers running PHP use Apache natively. I haven’t really had too many hickups with the conversions outside the font stuff and my Quickbooks not working on a Mac (Their Bad). Some bad’ol utilities I’ve come across and use on a regular basis are Quicksilver, Growl, istat pro gadget, Adium, Synergy and GimmeSomeTune.

If you’ve got rants or raves about my love/hate message here feel free to let me have it.