Apple and Mac OS X for Developers

Well, I did it.  I made the leap from the PC world to Mac.  Not that it was a far leap; I've been using Fedora as my primary OS since 2005.  The decision for me wasn't so much the "Apple sex-appeal" or even the OS, but more the engineering--it was the only i7 laptop I test drove (and I tried many) that didn't cook my wrists and could last an entire 8 hour business trip on battery.

Anyway, I thought it would be worth while to start a blog mini-series on my experiences as developer, architect, and business owner with Mac.

The new toy:
  • 15" Macbook Pro (April 2010)
  • High-Res Anti-Glare screen
  • Intel Core i7 @ 2.66 GHz
  • 4 GB RAM
  • 500GB 5400RPM Hard Disk
  • Mac OS X 10.6.3
Software:
  • Eclipse 3.6
  • Netbeans 6.9
  • Mono 2.6
  • Monodevelop 2.4
  • Oracle SQL Developer 2.1
  • MySQL 5.1
  • JBoss 5.1 with the Metro Web Services stack
  • Concept Draw Office
  • Open Office 3.2
  • Subversion Client
  • RapidSVN

Ode to Microsoft Windows

As most any developer who has left the Windows world will tell you, you can't really get away from Windows entirely.  I may not be a huge fan of Microsoft's business practice, but Visual Studio is an exceptional tool and almost essential if you're an enterprise .Net developer.  So I setup a virtual machine with Windows 7.  I chose Parallels Desktop 5 for my virtualization platform.  I'm an avid proponent of VM Ware, but despite the "speed improvements" in Fusion 3.1, Parallels still left it in the dust speed-wise, at least on my machine.  So far it's been very stable.

So my VM is setup with:
  • Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (with VT turned on, the benchmarks beat out XP)
  • Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition
  • Visual Studio 2010 Professional
  • .Net Framework 1.0 - 4.0
  • SQL Server 2008 Enterprise 64 bit
  • Postgres Advanced Server 8.4
  • Microsoft Office 2010
  • Visio 2010
  • Quickbooks 2010
For the time being, I have 2GB RAM and 1 processor core allocated to the VM.  My plan is to upgrade to 8GB RAM and allocate 4GB to the VM.


Initial Impression

So far I'm pleased with the machine and setup.  It definitely needs the RAM upgrade; when a I have a lot going on it swaps (and consequently slooows down).  The disk access is also a bit sluggish, but that's to be expected with only a 5400RPM drive.  I'm sure many are asking, "why didn't you just buy it loaded?"... the answer... price.  The upgrades directly from Apple are 2-3 times the price of NewEgg.  The only decision now is 7200RPM or SSD :)

I'm still getting all my tools installed, so I'll keep you posted.

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