Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

I’ve now had my new Macbook Pro for a little over a week. This is my first experience with a) an Intel Mac and b) OS X 10.5 (Leopard), so I thought I’d share some things I think really rock with my new setup:

1. Spaces (OS X’s virtual desktops implementation) - I tried a few third-party virtual desktop programs in the past, but they generally were buggy … and none of them are as slick as Apple’s implementation. I’ve gotten really comfortable with the setup in the last few days.
2. Time Machine (OS X’s new backup utility) - I plugged in my Western Digital MyBook 500gb drive and it immediately asked if I wanted to use it to back stuff up on. Well, now that you mention it … sure! And, it does this automatically when the drive is set up. I’d like the ability to tell it when not to do backups since a little extra disk usage during the day when I’m chugging away at the drive with other processes isn’t welcome, but other than that it’s slick.
3. Unity Mode in VMware Fusion - It’s creepy to see a Vista window on my OS X desktop, but it’s much nicer than running the OS in a window. Being able to switch back and forth between OS X and Windows apps rocks. Yeah, I know Parallels does it too, but I’m declaring my allegiance to Fusion since it runs the virtual machines I’ve made in VMware Server and Workstation. That’s just way too valuable.
4. iCal - Looks much better than it used to look. That is all.
5. System Preferences - Whoa! They made the network preferences logical! Yeah, I was confused the first time I went looking for Internet Connect to connect to my office VPN, but once I figured out where it was, I was happy. Oh, and the new icon is sexy too!

Now … when I can come up with the spare cash to upgrade to Adobe CS3 in the next month or so, I think all the apps I depend on for most of my work will be Universal Binaries. That reminds me … I have to give some props to Apple for handling the PowerPC => Intel transition so well. Yeah, there were some hiccups with the early machines (which I studiously avoided by being a cheapskate and sticking with my Powerbook for nearly four years) but overall it went really well.

I’ve looked forward to getting an Intel Mac for some time now, if for no other reason than because I could run a Windows virtual machine significantly faster since there wouldn’t be any need to do “translation” between Intel and PPC instruction sets. Even on my pretty healthy 1.5 GHz Powerbook G4 with 2 GB RAM, XP was glacially slow … and that was after I disabled nearly every non-essential Windows service and ran it at 800×600.

Then VMware introduced their Fusion product, which uses (basically) the same virtual machine format used by VMware Player, Workstation and Server. I’ve got all three products in use at work. I build VPS machines in Workstation, use them in Player, and have a number of Server VPS machines running on host machines at the datacenter. Running Fusion would mean that I could move the VPS machines to my Mac and test them, which would just be cool. Several times in the past, I’ve duplicated a running VPS from the datacenter and tested upgrades … and it’s saved my bacon.

In the last couple of weeks, while I’ve been without my Powerbook after its logic board failure, I created a CentOS5 VPS to use to test things on while I was using the Vista laptop. Yeah, I know I can install XAMPP, but I just don’t trust it for my development work. Of course when I got the Macbook yesterday, I went ahead and installed Fusion on it and copied over the VPS, and had it up and running with a minimal amount of hassle.

And today … just a few minutes ago, I discovered that they have an application that will convert Virtual PC 7 machines to the VMware format. I ran it on my IE7 XP virtual machine, and it worked like a charm. I’ve already ordered a copy of Vista to run as a virtual machine too (just because it’s different enough from XP that I want to be able to test on it without having to use another machine), but I probably won’t get it and be able to set it up until mid-week. Having the XP machine means I can test stuff in IE 7 right now. Yay for VMware!