Ok ok, so it’s not really a toy as, within about 48 hours, it will be my sole computer for development. But right now it sure feels like a toy.
I received the boxes from my wife at 8:45 ET this morning and promptly tore into them like a kid at Christmas. I have to admit, even with all the marketing hype and working in an office with so many Mac machines around, I’m still amazed at the quality of the machine. It just “feels” well made physically (and that’s before we even get to talking about the OS).
At the suggestion of some of the folks in the office, the first thing I did was reinstall OS X. Why you ask? Because they all said that in doing web development work (especially in our case where we’re deploying to Solaris environments) it is really handy to have your development files located on a case-sensitive partition. The default install from the factory is on a non-case-sensitive file system. So, I carved out 10GB or so at the back of the drive to put project files on and reinstalled OS X to the larger partition.
I spent most of the day actually having to work (imagine that!) but did manage to get my music pulled across the network from my Dell and several recommended software packages installed. I absolutely LOVE how OS X installs software–those .dmg files are the greatest.
I got Adium IM client and Skype up and running and tested the built-in camera and mic on a video call with my wife and kids and the iSight camera worked great (and is much easier to travel with than my Logitech Fusion on the Dell).
Next up is to get Apache/ColdFusion/MySQL/Eclipse set up so that, by Wednesday, I can be using this as my development box. Beyond that, I have to find a solution for an email client. I don’t like using web mail enough to completely go that route yet.
All I can say is that I’m loving this thing so far. More later…