Hungerford Web Design

Well, after five years of being pretty anti-mac for various reasons, I decided to bite the bullet and give them another go…. I’m now £3k out of pocket and loving it!

Why did I go for a mac? Many designers have been surprised at the fact that I have stuck with Windows (lately Vista SP1) for my design and development. They have all attempted to convert me to the darkside. I have never relented as windows did everything I needed it to do and had a variety of browsers to test on. I went for the mac this time round out of curiosity really. When I last used a mac it was an old iMac in 2001/2, I found it clunky, slow and a pain to understand.

What is my experience so far? Overall very good, I’m still yet to be convinced by only having one dock/toolbar as I use two displays. At the very least I see great merit in having a toolbar at the top of each display for the application currently in focus on that display. My primary reason for that is that I tend not to have a “primary” display, I use my displays equally during development. I may have Photoshop open in one and Dreamweaver in another and jump between the two. It would be even worse if I get another display (having to jump over two other windows simply to change a setting).

Perhaps this will change as I get used to working with the mac and change my style a little.

One of the other reasons for never switching to a mac was that I felt that the software support just didn’t cut it - WOW has that changed! I have so far bought / installed the following software which has made a huge difference to my interoperability with customers/suppliers/colleagues:

Office 2008 - keeps the windows boys happy
iLife/iWork 08 - keeps the mac lot happy (and TBH it’s simple enough for the Linux chaps too)
A variety of FTP /BT/SSH applications to help administrating the servers
Many browsers for cross-browser testing (IE:mac, Firefox, Safari, Opera)
Creative Suite (Photoshop/Dreamweaver etc)

I have also kept my main Windows Vista machine (it was far too expensive to just sell/bin) and my two linux machines as the thing I have noticed most is that the browser may perform differently based on the OS, particularly with fonts.

So, I took it upon myself to spend the last week using nothing but the mac, to force me to get used to it a little. The biggest thing I miss really is my comfort factor. With using windows since 3.1/1 I know where EVERYTHING is, I know all the DOS commands and switches I need and I know exactly how to hack the OS to do what I want. I now feel like a little boy in a scary wood. I’m scared to edit the kext or applescript, I’m worried about not adding the right switch in the terminal (despite it being very similar to my nix boxes), that will come with time. Font support is a little different too and that’s highlighted on some websites which seem to have no appreciated for non-windows users (another reason I wanted the mac). As mentioned before, I’m going to investigate the possibility of another toolbar for the second display, there may be an app I can find which does it! The modular nature of apple applications is very strange to me as a windows user, of course I bought Dreamweaver/Photoshop etc for the mac and being able to move each part to another screen is a little weird (coupled with the fact that despite my high screen resolution, all fonts are a little large for my liking).

I can see why apple have been so successful of late, and to be honest I think that’s helped greatly in terms of the software support from 3rd parties. For example, I have a Windows mobile PDAPhone (HTC TytnII), I can sync it with all of my mac apps as well as the windows ones - I was very impressed at that.

Would I buy more apple hardware? Absolutely, although I don’t think I am a complete convert yet and rather than become a fan-boy who loves everything by a particular manufacturer simply because they made it, I would have to say that I can see many benefits and pitfalls of each OS depending on how it’s being used and the environment it’s in. Those lines are becoming a little more blurred and it will be interesting to see what the next five years holds.

….and one last thing - 2 updates since the OS CD was produced on the mac - 32 in a few weeks on the Vista box!

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