I bought a Mac.

The BCIT technorati have been all abuzz about a new iPhone development course on the curriculum and I want to learn first hand what developing apps for the iPhone is all about.  I’ve read good and bad stories about the extent of Apple’s control over your products, and I would like to go through the development cycle myself and decide whether building apps for the iPhone really is the new black.

The course starts in September and I have some time off this summer so buying a Mac now and getting acquainted with Macdom at my own pace seemed like a good idea.  With much ado we bought it, and I installed a few development apps, and then put it away and pulled out my 17” HP Pavilion and played some WoW.

I basically put the Mac out of my mind until Canada Day eve.  We spent the evening loading the car for our epic annual Canada Day trip and barbecue to Manning Park and I sat down to run a few instances with my main Brestamynd before bed.  Picture it.  The Pit of Saron rings with the sound of our battle against the Scourgelord Tyrannus.  We’re down a mage, our tank is losing ground and the healer is finding it hard to keep up.  My cat is dead but I’ve been playing my mana well and we still have a chance because Tyrannus is down to 40% health and our tank is an aggro wizard.

And my graphics card unceremoniously blew up.

The neighbourhood rang with the sound of my frustration.

Hours later, after the tears had dried and I’d exhausted all my efforts to repair my beloved 17” laptop I slunk, tail between my legs, broken and resigned, to the back of the closet and retrieved my 13” Macbook Pro.

I’m never going back.  I am an unabashed, unashamed, unmitigated convert.  I love my Mac.  We have a 20” Samsung SyncMaster 205BW and my handy mini-DVI cable means I get to play my WoW, which runs on a Mac, in even larger and more highly resolved glory than ever before.  Development tools went on in a fraction of the time it took to install them on a Win 7 machine because half of them are already there (Mac OS X 10.6, the operating system, being based on Unix where many of those tools are developed in the first place).  The keyboard is a little small, so I bought a full-sized USB keyboard with a number pad.

I am using Virtual Box, which I’ve touted before, to host a virtual machine with Win 7 64-bit.   Why bother?  I need my MS OneNote, which is perhaps the best note-taking software ever.  I have OneNote on my ultra-portable Gateway netbook, which Scott affectionately calls my clutch, but the keyboard is simply too small for me and I just use it for reading eBooks and surfing the web.

During this epic migration from PC to Mac I finally discovered how to use the cloud.  There’s been a lot of  talk about cloud computing but I have not found any utility in the cloud for me.  This all changed when my friend Susan, a Communication instructor, invited me to join Dropbox.

Dropbox is a storage space “out there” in the cloud, which is nothing new, but the Dropbox application residing on any number of the computers I use during the day lets me treat it like a folder in Win 7’s Explorer and Mac’s Finder.  I can drag and drop files to and from my Dropbox, and the folder’s contents are synced realtime on the remote server and on my other computers.  I’ve tested it with my netbook and Mac side by side and it takes mere seconds.  Since the files reside on each system I can work on things when I’m offline and then sync up as soon as I’m back on the Interweb.  And if I’m on a computer that doesn’t have the Dropbox application, I can access what I need from the Dropbox website.

So far I’ve uploaded my summer reading list, some course material, my Eclipse workspace and, of course, all my OneNotes folders.  There’s even a public folder in my Dropbox and I can distribute the unique URL and give friends read or read and write access.  My colleague Sara and I are using it to coordinate our efforts this summer as we tackle Project Euler in Java, Scheme and C/C++.  We used GoogleDocs to create a spreadsheet where we’re tracking our progress, and GoogleWave gives us a place to exchange ideas.  Our shared Dropbox folder acts as a repository for our solution code.

The repair shop called about the HP a few days ago and said it was fixable, but they wouldn’t do it.  I heard whispers about a design flaw, about many, many HP Pavilions having this trouble because of overheating and poor ventilation.  It’s only two years old.  We booted it in safe mode and disabled the video card drivers, and Win 7 kicked in with vgaSafe drivers so I can use it for office apps, but my days of grinding dungeons on the Pavilion are over.

I’d like to say that my move to Mac has been effortless but yesterday I woke up and opened my Mac and discovered that it could no longer find our wireless network.  Huh?  I tried rebooting a few times and it didn’t work.  So Macs aren’t so bug-free after all.  Sinking feeling. I called the support line and was speaking to someone within a minute. I learned that I had to reset the computer’s PRAM.  The support representative was very careful to avoid calling this a bug as we did this together over the phone.  It worked.  I’m happy.