Switching to Mac
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- nocomply0
OK so it sounds like I do almost exactly the same stuff as you, and after 15+ years of Windows I switched to my first Mac about 2.5 months ago. Here's a quick run-down of my experience thus far.
The first week was a bitch! I had to Google (and even post on QBN) for help with the most simple tasks. It was crippling. Now I know how my parents feel when they call me for computer help. But if you're dedicated to persevering you'll get the hang of things pretty quickly.
The hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts are tough to get used to at first but it becomes second nature pretty quickly as well.
One of hardest thing for me to get used to was having no easy way to copy and paste a local directory path when opening items, saving items, etc... If someone has a good solution for that please let me know.
One nice perk of the Mac OS is that it's built on Unix and you have easy access to terminal/shell. I knew nothing about it before I got my Mac, but I've slowly been learning and unleashing it's power. For me it's been fun and rewarding, but I'd imagine for many it's more of a waste of time.
I bought a 13" retina display Macbook Pro. It's a glorious piece of machinery. Definitely better than any other laptop on the market IMO. And I've already mentioned on here before that the retina display is amazing. However the retina display actually makes working in photoshop a little tricky because you'll need to zoom into 200%.
I thought switching to a Mac would make me faster and more efficient with my work, but I don't really think that's the case. In the end I think I've become equally fast, but in a different way.
The trackpad gestures are really cool, but I almost never use them because 90% of the time I hook my laptop up to an external monitor, mouse and keyboard. I even bought the magic trackpad (or whatever it's called) but it just sits on my desk and takes of real estate. I touch it maybe 2-3X per day.
The magic mouse sucks. I tried it out and it's an absolutely horrible shape. I can't let go of my logitech mouse.
One of the reasons I was originally attracted to switching to a Mac was the software, but in the end all of the software that I use daily is available on Windows as well. I thought Coda was going to change my world, but I tried it and couldn't get that into it after years of working with Dreamweaver. Then I tried Sublime Text 2, which I think is really great, but I still open up DW regularly for some tasks where it's just the best tool for me to get the job done.
I can't comment on working with ASP and SQL on a Mac because I never do it, but I recommend what others have said in regards to having a separate Windows machine for those tasks. I still boot up my old Windows 8 laptop regularly to test my websites in various versions of IE. For me it's easier and more fool-proof than fumbling with parallels or any other type of virtual machine. But if you need to work on that stuff all the time then maybe you'll have no choice but to install a Windows OS on your Mac.
So the question I ask myself now is whether I'm better off being on a Mac... Honestly, I'm not really sure. I'm not really faster, and I don't necessarily find the Mac OS significantly more enjoyable. But the one thing I will say is that it has made me more excited about technology and operating systems in general. Liberation from years of Windows bondage has felt kind of nice. I even installed Ubuntu on one of my old machines just for the hell of it and it's actually pretty rad.
Sorry this is so long. Hope it helps some.
- if you "get info" on any file or folder you can copy its path from there easilymonospaced
- Great info, have you run in to any issues with browser appearances on retina vs non-retina?hereswhatidid
- things like image dimensions and what nothereswhatidid
- Things look smaller on my retina display because I run it at a scaled resolution. But for the most part no major issues.nocomply
- I have not done much experimentation on HDPI images for the web yet though.nocomply
- I haven't used a Retina MBP yet.monospaced
- open a terminal window, drag the file there and you get the path.zarkonite