Development, Analysis And Research

Well, I purchased a Mac Book Pro roughly a month ago and considering I have never used a Mac, i’m quite surprised as to how quickly I have adapted. Within a week I had a good grasp of the platform and now I have everything sync’d to or through my laptop, whether that be incoming phone calls on my mobile or syncronising data between multiple servers.

The fundamental aspects I like about Mac is the degree of control, you have over the OS with applescript or shell. As mentioned above, I am now making my Mac work for me with proximity detection via bluetooth, and/or trigger applescripts when motion is detected via the iSight. I find this extremely useful to actually log phone calls in iCal, or pause iTunes when on the phone. I’m also tempted to write some applescript to automatically log me onto the the intranet at work, and track my time keeping for me, with aspects such as this it just makes my life that little bit easier.

With that said, i’m not a complete Mac convert, as I have got my windows machine at work & at home constantly shelled into the Mac, I’m finding that I am only using windows to test against IE 6 or as an extra keyboard. Despite some of its gains I am still yet to figure out how to get my Exchange account at work to work completely remotely with it using a reverse proxy, I guess thats simply time and patience I need to get that setup. I guess the key things now are finding out what else is possible, and making my development experience better.

Anyway, I found the following links useful.

www.kernelthread.com
www.opensourcemac.org
www.petermaurer.de

Oh, and a pointer from Eric…
SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys
BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com
MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software, which seems pretty generous to me:).