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Return of the Mac (2005)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#61

Post by sid0 »

robgough wrote: post #54
Tichy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a Mac two years ago for iPhone dev (which I ended up not doing), and in my opinion you don't have to switch to a Mac if you are already a Linux user. I still prefer Linux. The only problem is buying any other notebooks that are good. It is very difficult to find notebooks with acceptable design and specs. I have to say I am not a Mac power user. I am too lazy to learn gestures (and hence don't want to update…

May I suggest you look into "Hot Corners", which is built into OS X and allows you to specify certain actions when moving the mouse to the very corner of the screen. I heavily use the gestures, but I still find these rather handy My setup is; Top Left: Show Desktop Top Right: Expose (on Lion, Mission Control) Bottom Left: Blank Screen (without sleeping) Bottom Right: Screensaver

Hot corners seem like a terrible idea, simply because they're far too easy to acquire (by Fitts' Law). I don't want Expose or whatever to show up every single time I move my mouse to the top right corner, which is often accidentally.

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#62

Post by zobzu »

walexander wrote: post #19

OK, someone convince me to go Mac. I've had essentially zero issues with Windows. I do 99% of my development in Linux (access my devbox through VNC). For desktop use, I have absolutely no problems. I work very fast zooming around with keyboard shortcuts. I don't get viruses or bloatware. Everything is calm and familiar. Every time I get my hands on a Mac, even to simply Google something, I immediately hit issues. Pas…

Easy. Keep Windows. It works - and well in fact. It's technologically well advanced. No matter what they want you to believe, the latest 10.7 OSX implemented features Windows had for 3 to 20 years. 20! And it's still missing some.

There no need to switch. It's not because everyone would start jumping off the cliff that you need to be convinced to do the same, right? Same story.

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#63

Post by robgough »

sid0 wrote: post #61
robgough wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I suggest you look into "Hot Corners", which is built into OS X and allows you to specify certain actions when moving the mouse to the very corner of the screen. I heavily use the gestures, but I still find these rather handy My setup is; Top Left: Show Desktop Top Right: Expose (on Lion, Mission Control) Bottom Left: Blank Screen (without sleeping) Bottom Right: Screensaver

Hot corners seem like a terrible idea, simply because they're far too easy to acquire (by Fitts' Law). I don't want Expose or whatever to show up every single time I move my mouse to the top right corner, which is often accidentally.

I've had this setup for years now, and never accidentally done this.

Don't forget on a Mac you're much less often moving your mouse to the top right corner (window closing is on the top left of a window.

The further most icons are always the Apple on the left, and Spotlight on the right. Both of which I rarely open by hand. If I'm using Spotlight it's always by keyboard command Cmd-Space (though often I use Alfred instead).

And at least on a Laptop I rarely need to shutdown the Mac, which is all I'd use the Apple menu for. Though again, anything I'd go to that menu for I use Alfred for instead.

May be worth turning it on and see how you get on with it?

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#64

Post by zobzu »

jasonkester wrote: post #59
walexander wrote: post #19

OK, someone convince me to go Mac. I've had essentially zero issues with Windows. I do 99% of my development in Linux (access my devbox through VNC). For desktop use, I have absolutely no problems. I work very fast zooming around with keyboard shortcuts. I don't get viruses or bloatware. Everything is calm and familiar. Every time I get my hands on a Mac, even to simply Google something, I immediately hit issues. Pas…

Here's how I did it: Step One: Come up with some lame excuse for why you probably need a Mac. You know, Testing. Gotta make sure it looks right on Safari and all that. Maybe we'll be doing an iOS version at some point. Step Two: Convince yourself that you'll install Windows 7 on it to see if you can maybe use it as your dev box. It'll just be a windows machine on cooler hardware. Step Three: Go to Apple.com and confi…

yeah its actually pretty slow compared to my vaio Z on Windows... and the energy saving drivers on Windows are poor at best on Macs. (by design, heh)

I am amused by the number of people who actually run Windows in // or vmware or vbox on their Mac cause they need apps that don't exist on Macs, or just have crappy support. Likewise for Linux apps which they run on OSX that way because the so great OSX underlaying unix makes it too complicated to port a couple of CLI apps (not even mentioning the GUI apps - UI toolkits for OSX all look horrible)

Running OSX is actually just to be part of the hype.

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#65

Post by zobzu »

mise wrote: post #53
Tichy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a Mac two years ago for iPhone dev (which I ended up not doing), and in my opinion you don't have to switch to a Mac if you are already a Linux user. I still prefer Linux. The only problem is buying any other notebooks that are good. It is very difficult to find notebooks with acceptable design and specs. I have to say I am not a Mac power user. I am too lazy to learn gestures (and hence don't want to update…

Agreed. When looking at laptops that have decent spec and to run Ubuntu on, you suddenly reach the same price as a Macbook Air.

Asus.

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#66

Post by olefoo »

adambyrtek wrote: post #55
dazonic wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wanna get cross-platformy, Mac is the only system where you can run and virtualise every OS. It's a web dev's dream.

What do you mean? You can "virtualise every OS" on other platforms as well.

You cannot legally run OS X on anything other than Apple hardware. This gets really annoying when you want to set up a headless browser testing cluster because you can't virtualize any of the Mac OS's you might be targeting.

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#67

Post by zobzu »

adambyrtek wrote: post #55
dazonic wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wanna get cross-platformy, Mac is the only system where you can run and virtualise every OS. It's a web dev's dream.

What do you mean? You can "virtualise every OS" on other platforms as well.

Should also mention that the Mac visualizer them so damn slow. Cause yeah Ive a 2011 high end mac. And Vmware, parallels or vbox, they're all slower than on Windows and Linux Figures.

I'm virtualizing OSX on PCs, I don't care that Apple put a virtual limitation saying "you've no right to do that! its our software!".

It's just as broken as software patents. I pay for it, I use it as a please. Sue me.

Funny than when it comes from Apple its ok and good reason to buy a Mac tho. Imagine if Microsoft did that? Really, just imagine it one second and how bad you'd hate them.

Humans.

Re: Return of the Mac (2005)

#70

Post by atomicdog »

r0s wrote: post #32
lallysingh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Macs are high-end machines and come with a sane OS on them, with support from the manufacturer. The last two issues together: sane OS, manufacturer support, basically knock out the rest of the market.

A sane OS would let me delete a file with the delete key(!).

'Enter' to rename is pretty insane also
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