So, I bought a mac. that's pretty much where I've been for the past month.

I've always wondered what the other side looked like, so one day I broke down and decided to find out. I was able to find a used mac on ebay pretty cheap, so I'm now the proud owner of a power mac dual 450 with 512 ram. At first I was worried Tiger would be slugish, but have been pleasantly surprised with the speed of Tiger on this older box, even when I have a few applications running.

It came on a Saturday, and boy was I excited. I had started the research some weeks back, figuring out what the hardware lines are, and what the applications besides tiger and itunes did. I had a few mac friends, so I asked them a few questions here and there, and they all seemed to fit the "I love my mac" mold. A few were surprised I was asking.

I had other things going on that Saturday, but I had to at least turn it on. So I pull it out of the box, and marvel at the case for a couple minutes. Macs are pretty. After reading all the mac propaganda as well, I can't say I wasn't excited, with very high expectations. Turn it on, and realize I haven't the foggiest clue what to do with this thing.

I purchased that mac primarily to evaluate it as a development platform. I mean I am a developer, so what else would I use this thing for? I decided, though, that if I want to develop software for a mac, I should probably use one, at least for a day or two. So my first project was to turn off one of my main workstations at home. Within 2 days I was able to turn the box off by finding free or cheap alternatives to the few applications I actually needed, and had moved all of my home computing over to the mac.

Everything is different. Installing apps is simply dragging a folder, that looks like a file, to your applications folder. Wanna uninstall it? Delete the file. The X doesn't close apps, get used to that. After some growing pains, I'm moving around ok in osx. Everything just seems a little simpler. Osx is of course bsd at its core, so things like sudo port install ruby make me smile as well. I'm really starting to dig the osx interface. It just feels warm and fuzzy.

Apple gives away the development tools, which also helped me along with the purchasing decision. If I had to pay for Xcode, I doubt the mac would have looked like a cool experiment anymore. Soon after I have moved my daily life into the mac, it's time to install some development tools. Xcode is first. The download and install seemed to take forever, much like any given vs.net install. Hmm, Xcode is different too. Way different. I'll come back to you. For now, lets look at textmate and rails.

One of the mac friends I have been talking to told me I needed textmate. Although I haven't even begun to really step into it, I can see textmate will fit the programming editor bill very well. So I sat down with textmate and started looking at rails. See part of the drive of looking at mac is to look at something new. So if I'm going to look at a dynamic framework like obj-c and cocoa, might as well spend more time with ruby and rails at the same time. I had been an on and off ruby/rails researcher, but spent a good amount of time playing with it on the mac, and have come to realize rails is very.. very cool. Rails will be a fantastic web platform for my little experiment.

So all this time I was reading about obj-c and cocoa on the side. I think they intimidated me. Xcode looks very complex when you first open it, which usually never scares me. But it did. So I bought a book. I'm about halfway through it now, and am impressed with the framework thus far. Objective-C is.. like.. different. See a theme here? Today it blew my mind when I read all method calls messages were instances of NSInvocation. Interesting. Cocoa and Obj-C make an interesting dynamically typed pair. At first glance, this still looks quite fun.

So this is getting a bit long. I've been gone for a while, but hope to post quite a bit more. But there may be a few mac/cocoa/ruby/rails posts on the way.