It began with an excuse to toy with a Mac.

For the last few months, I have had a rather unique opportunity. Certainly not something to be considered a unique opportunity by all, but I think that I make something of a special case. As I mentioned in my last entry, I have been doing my present co-op term with a small start-up company, Enflick, who specializes in social networking apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Anyways, this has given me an opportunity that I've never really taken for myself before: working with the Mac OS X operating system.

Hearing that, you'll likely argue that this isn't a very special opportunity at all. Especially in a university environment like where I'm at, where our Math/Computer Science building has several labs chock-full of iMac computers. As a computer user who first used DOS and then Windows, I was positively entranced when I learned about the wonder-filled world that was Linux. Free software as far as the eye could see, boundless customization and freedom, and a vibrant community of developers. Macs were still, "oh, right, a Mac. So what? They don't offer me anything exciting". Given that Macs were still making the move away from the PowerPC chipset, maybe I was correct at the time. The point is that I never really sat down and gave the operating system a thorough looking-through. Much like the other two 'big' operating systems, Windows and Linux, Mac also has a variety of negative connotations associated to it from its various critics.

Working at Enflick gave me a chance to work with three things that were very foreign to me: the iPhone, Objective-C, and the Mac OS X operating system. In fact, I was most drawn to the original job posting *because* the notion of working with a set of new technologies that I had nearly nil experience with was a rather exciting one.

Okay then, so what? I've used OS X as (more or less) my primary operating system for the last two months, learned some Objective-C, and have done some iPhone development -- big deal. And you're right, it isn't a big deal. I'm still out to lunch as to what I think about Objective-C (that's a post for another day), but I really developed a nice feeling whilst using OS X.


Why OS X is a *very* attractive option.

I don't claim to be an expert, but I do know that OS X is running on a *very* Unix-like architecture underneath the sleekly streamlined user interface. I loved my time working with Linux and the variety of GNU and/or BSD (depending on the distro I had installed at the time) tools, the slew of free software, and just the general "Unix way" philosophy of doing things. Luckily I'm no purist in such ideals though, since OS X (and certainly not Apple's business practices) are not, but to me I really got an incredibly pleasant sensation of feeling like I was running a Linux-like system with my two main irks cleared up: a) device drivers just *worked*, and b) a set of streamlined, polished, fully featured applications atop the command line interface that also just *work*. There are other reasons, but those two really sold me over. Not to mention just about all of my favourite Linux software runs just fine on Mac either natively or via its X11 server. Oh, and it is rather perfect for my current adventures in iPhone game development. [smile]

Knowing all of that, and having had been doing some cautious budgeting for next several months, I buckled down and purchased myself a shiny new MacBook Pro.



I only unpackaged it this evening, but thus far -- including scribbling out this journal entry -- it has been rather pleasant. The hardware has made everything lightning fast and responsive, and the physical laptop itself is incredibly sleek. Even better yet, the 13" screen is plenty large enough to get into some serious development, which I could *not* say the same about for my old Toshiba 10" netbook. [sad]


This entry felt notoriously one-sided, but I'm still quite excited about having another set of technology to tinker and experiment with. Don't worry, I haven't fallen to the depths of fanboy-ism just yet. [grin]