Contents tagged with Apple
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.NET development on Macs
I posted the “exciting” conclusion of my laptop trade-ins and issues on my personal blog. The links, in chronological order, are posted below. While those posts have all of the details about performance and software used, I wanted to comment on why I like using Macs in the first place.
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.NET development on a Retina MacBook Pro with Windows 8
I remember sitting in Building 5 at Microsoft with some of my coworkers, when one of them came in with a shiny new 11” MacBook Air. It was nearly two years ago, and we found it pretty odd that the OEM’s building Windows machines sucked at industrial design in a way that defied logic. While Dell and HP were in a race to the bottom building commodity crap, Apple was staying out of the low-end market completely, and focusing on better design. In the process, they managed to build machines people actually wanted, and maintain an insanely high margin in the process.
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.NET development on a “Retina” MacBook Pro
The rumor that Apple would release a super high resolution version of its 15” laptop has been around for quite awhile, and one I watched closely. After more than three years with a 17” MacBook Pro, and all of the screen real estate it offered, I was ready to replace it with something much lighter. It was a fantastic machine, still doing 6 or 7 hours after 460 charge cycles, but I wanted lighter and faster. With the SSD I put in it, I was able to sell it for $750.
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The best computer ever
(This is a repost from my personal blog… wow… I need to write more technical stuff!)
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Snow Leopard impressions
I was one of the nerds that went to church, er, the Apple Store, yesterday to pick up Snow Leopard, the OS X update. For $29, I think it's a pretty reasonable upgrade price (are you listening, Windows 7 pricing people?), considering it's an evolutionary upgrade and not feature heavy.
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Windows 7 in Parallels on a Mac
It's no secret that I'm all about Mac hardware and living in OS X when I'm not developing .NET stuff. It's also no secret that I thought Vista was too much of a dog to use, and have been sticking to Windows XP because of that. And in all fairness, I suppose some of that bias is rooted in the fact that Vista was a nightmare on my wife's old laptop, but I did experiment a little with it in a Parallels VM, and it just felt clunky. The outright bizarre dialogs with a chapter of text for everything also threw me for a loop.
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Silverlight request: Make it work for iPhone apps
Obviously Silverlight runs on OS X. That much we know, since developers like me use it for non-development tasks instead of Windows. How difficult would it be to adapt it to stand-alone apps on the iPhone? Even if it had to include the runtime and base library (at a few megabytes), it would still be pretty cool, and we wouldn't have to use Xcode (which I'm not impressed with).
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Three years on the Mac, plus more thoughts on the new 17" MacBook Pro
A few weeks ago, I bought one of the new 17" MacBook Pros to replace my almost-three-year-old 15" model, the first of the Intel Macs. Hard to believe it has been three years! I'll get to the thoughts on the 17" momentarily.
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First impressions using 17" MacBook Pro
I'm really impressed with the new laptop (and for what it costs, I suppose one should). I was just shy of using my old one, the first Intel-based 15" MacBook Pro, for three straight years, but as we speak, the old one is getting a fresh install so Diana can use it. Even at three, it's still a lot easier to use than her newer Vista Dell.
The thing that impressed me immediately is how solid it is. I've picked up and twisted the 13" and 15" models in the store, but I guess I still felt that the 17" just "had" to feel less solid. But it doesn't at all, it feels exactly the same. I give Apple a lot of credit for going to this machined solid block of aluminum. It makes a huge difference.
Also impressive was the migration app that pulls all of your junk over the wire from your old comprooder. It apparently is even smart enough to set the ethernet port to cross-over. Nice. It took a little over an hour to move the 50 gigs worth of junk, and when it was done, everything (mostly) worked as it did before. My browsing history and bookmarks were all there, all of the apps I installed, etc. Even keyboard preferences made it over (important for Visual Studio users, of course). It was even smart enough not to copy over older versions of iPhoto and such. The only pain was the serial numbers, having to re-enter them for the pro apps, and having to deactivate CS3 before activating it on the new one.
No heat issues at all. Fans idle silently at 2000 rpm, and there are no hot spots. Screen is beautiful, and I'm not getting all of the criticism toward the glossy screens. Four-finger swiping to activate Expose is sweet. Parallels screams giving it 2 of the 4 gigs to work with. Keyboard is a huge improvement. The size for the 17" isn't nearly as troublesome as I worried it might be.
The battery, man, I don't even know what to make of that. I'm running in the better performance mode, using the better video processor, screen at full brightness, keyboard lights on, and it looks like it'll easily do five hours on a single charge. My guess is that you can easily get six or seven if you back off. I know Apple says eight, but honestly, I was hoping for five or more, and that seems easily achievable.
I suppose I'll post more after I use it, but at this point I'm not honestly expecting much to be different than what I've experienced for the last three years. Yeah, I know these things aren't cheap, but considering the time I spend on it, it seems to me that it's worth the expense to buy something I like better. -
Parallels Desktop 4.0 released
Parallels Desktop 4.0 came out today, and although 3.0 was working fine for me, I decided to upgrade right away after reading some initial reactions. At $40, it didn't strike me as a horrible expense.