What I need from the Mac world

Originally posted from:  http://morewally.com/cs/blogs/wallym/archive/2006/07/21/194.aspx

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1909732,00.asp

Ok, I admit it.  I have been pretty anti-Mac for years.  I have seen it is an undevelopable system , running on a foreign processor, built by a company on shaky ground. 

In my world, there have been two processor families: Intel 32 bit and AMD 64 bit.  Everything else was essentially alien.  Yes, that statement comes from someone that 15 years ago looked down on Intel designs, but I digress.  Obviously, the processor situation has changed as Apple has transitioned the Mac to Intel processors.  With that, I now have the ability to run Windows or the Mac on a common piece of hardware, though I have to purchase that hardware from Apple.  I can live with that.

Historically, Apple has been on shaky financial ground.  Sometimes they seem to be headed up and sometimes they seem to be headed down financially.  They were not something that I wanted to spend time working on, that was for sure.  Well, over the last 18 months, I have been taking note of their financial situation.  It has definitely improved.  I am now an iPod owner.  Maybe I should buy a Mac also?  I'll think about that.

The last question is the most critical for me.  I am a developer.  I live in Microsoft's .NET framework, Windows, and Visual Studio.  I write books on .NET.  While I am not really concerned about writing ASP.NET applications that would run on the Mac server, it would be interesting to know how to develop applications to run on the Mac and to get client/gui applications running there.  I have never been a big fan of java because of its intense amount of resources it requires at the client (CPU, memory, time).  I would like to know what the development tools are to get good applications up and running on the Mac.  I've spent the last 10+ years pretty much dedicated to Windows, so I need things that are fairly easy to get up and running with and are not too alien.

So, thats it world.  I have no eliminated two of my three strikes that I have had against the Mac.  Tell me, what development tools are out there for the Mac.