@FIRST_LIGHT

This video shows just how much fluff we marketers can stuff into a presentation. The creator has achieved an amazing a 90:1 compression ratio.

Overall, I was underwhelmed by the news, but I’m happy to have my new iPhone features and glad that my Macbook Pro is not necessarily obsolete just a month after I bought it.

At Adobe my personal IT environment consisted of the following:
- Lenovo T62P laptop running Windows XP/Office/Outlook/Firefox
- Treo 700P smartphone running Goodlink
- Maxstor 1 terabyte external hard drive accessed via USB 2.0

When I joined Acquia, the new team ganged up on me and strongly encouraged me to switch over to Mac. I hadn’t use a Mac since 1994 when I worked at Seiko in Japan as a translator/localizer. After I came back and went to business school, I was a Windows guy for the following decade.

Knowing that I could always use Parallels to run Windows on a Mac certainly helped take some of the risk out of the equation for me. I figured that if things got too hairy, I could just use my Mac as very expensive Windows machine in a pinch. So switch I did.

So now at Acquia, my personal IT environment is as follows:
- Macbook Pro laptop with glossy screen running OS X Leopard/Office:Mac/Quicksilver/Thunderbird/Firebird
- iPhone smartphone
- Maxstor 1 terabyte external hard drive accessed via 1394b

I was able to successfully migrate my Firefox profile and files to the Mac. I’m amazed at how much of my productivity environment is in Firefox. More than anything else, this has eased my transition, because a web app is a web app.

Overall, I’m very happy with the move. The Mac laptop is very elegant, fast, and stable. The designers have just put more thought into everything on this platform. The iPhone is the most amazing piece of design/engineering I’ve ever held in my hand. It’s like an artifact from another planet. Truly amazing.

That’s not to say it’s been a perfect transition. Here’s my gripe list:
1) I’m still trying to unlearn and relearn keyboard shortcuts and learn the idiosyncrasies of the Mac operating system. It slows me down.
2) I just simply do not like the messy windowing approach that the Mac OS uses. It seems like I always have a cluttered desktop. Getting things sized to full screen is a manual process, and that’s just annoying.
3) Office:Mac is, ahem, a less than perfect piece of software. It gives a new depth of meaning to the phrase “necessary evil”. Entourage can’t connect to our mail server (but Thunderbird and Apple Mail have no problem), and the other apps are dog slow.
4) Adobe Acrobat Connect is so unstable on the Mac as to be unusable. I used this app for 4+ hours per day on Windows and it was rock solid. On the Mac, it cannot stay up for more than 20 minutes. Ugh. This is killing my remote collaboration style.
5) Firefox is not too speedy on the Mac. I need it because I have a pretty tweaked out set of extensions I use to get through the day, but it just not as much fun as it was on Windows due to the slower speed. Safari is fast, but that’s about all I can say that’s good about it.

I’ll continue posting as I discover new things, but overall, I’m happy with the switch.