Well, OK folks, I'm doing it. Coming over to the White Sde.

[Jackpine Radical]

Bill Gates finally got to me. I decided definitively I'm never gonna do Vista, and although I could no doubt lug along in XP forever, I just don't want to do it. If I know I'm gonna jump, then I might as well do it now.

I ordered a Macbook from Amazon yesterday. My wife is slowly switching over to a Macbook we bought her last March. I'll probably try to do the switch a lot faster, although I have some spreadsheet things & even one old DOS BASIC program I'll have to keep doing on Microsquish machines.

We've got iWORK that I expect to use for a word processor (I do a fair amount of writing, at least 2-3,000 words a week of reports + miscellaneous other stuff not counting DU & the like), and figure on Mariner for my spreadsheet. I'll want to sync my Palm T|X with the Mac, and will be hunting for software for various other purposes. Would love to have some hourly billing & invoicing SW.

I expect I'll get Parallels going at some point. Boot Camp sounds just too clumsy. I do use Dragon dictation SW to some extent, & see that people have gotten it to work under Parallels.

So, I have a very open question. What can you tell me that will help with the transition? If you switched recently, what do you wish someone had told you?

Oh, and one more question. Years ago I used to do a bit of programming, just stuff for myself. FORTRAN in my ancient period, BASIC in Medieval times. I never made the jump to Visual Basic (despite a couple of abortive shots at learning it). There are a few things I'd like to do now. Nothing 'way serious. So, would it be worth my while to learn Perl? Or some other language? What do you recommend for general-purpose tinkering?

[fightthegoodfightnow]

1. You Ask

You ask: 'What can you tell me that will help with the transition? If you switched recently, what do you wish someone had told you?"

Honestly, nothing. I was expecting the worst and was amazed I didn't experience any problems. My work environment was Windows XP and I thought the Mac OS would present problems whether using Mac Word or Mac Windows, etc. No problems. In fact, I've become one of those Mac worshippers. I use iWorks as well.

As for programming, I defer to others.

Enjoy your Mac.

[davidwparker]

5. prefer OS X programming. I like the Unix core. I don't touch Windows anymore

unless I'm at work. The company uses Lotus Notes and I need that. Outside of that, Windows could go :nuke: and I wouldn't miss it.

[Poiuyt]

2. You may want to consider getting MS Office (Mac version)

That way you'd be able to use software that you'd be more familiar with...Word for word processing, Excel for spreadsheet, etc. And Entourage is a great email/calender/address book program. I like to use Pages (from iWorks) as a page layout program but not for word processing.

I sync my Palm to Entourage, so you shouldn't have any problem finding the right software for that.

QuickBooks is available for the Mac for your billing and invoice stuff.

Other than that, it should be pretty intuitive.

[alfredo]

7. Neo Office or Open Office will do if you can't afford MS Office.

You can get several flavors of Basic if you get the urge. Perl, Python, and Ruby come installed. Check out AppleScript You might find it useful. Look at XCode in your Developer tools


For Layout, check out Scribus.

http://www.scribus.net/index.php?name=Sections&req=viewarticle&artid=3


Inkscape for SVG

http://inkscape.org/download/

for free and shareware software:

http://www.macupdate.com/

[moggie]

3. I'd say forget Parallels, personally

VMware Fusion is in beta for Mac, and should ship before August: pre-order it now and save money. I've been using the beta quite heavily (for Linux rather than Windows) and found it very solid. I was never particularly impressed with Parallels, and it crapped out on me a couple of times.

I can't help with switching, because my background is Unix rather than Windows: I've barely used the latter.

As for programming, if you want to do "general-purpose tinkering", you've got a choice of scripting languages: the Mac comes with Perl, Python and Ruby. I've done a lot of programming in Perl, but I'm now warming to Ruby, which is a cleaner language. And once you've developed your Ruby skills, you can use them for website development using Ruby for Rails (install the Aptana IDE and its Rails plugin). If you want to get fancy and produce natural-looking GUI applications, install Xcode (comes with your Macbook, but isn't installed by default) and get "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass.

Since the Mac is Unix under the hood, there's a huge amount of open-source software for it. There are two popular package managers which will make it easy to install open-source stuff and keep it up to date: MacPorts and Fink. This way, you could probably even stick with FORTRAN or BASIC, if you're feeling masochistic.

Invest in an external disk and a copy of SuperDuper! for backups.

http://www.vmware.com/beta/fusion/
http://www.aptana.com/
http://www.macports.org/
http://www.finkproject.org/
http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-OS-2nd/dp/0321213149/
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

[Jackpine Radical]

4. Thanks everyone.

Y'all make me glad I asked.

Another question, though--What about NeoOffice? I fooled with OpenOffice a few years ago in Windows but gave it up because I was having difficulty figuring out how to do various things that I already knew how to do in Office.

[sellitman]

6. Welcome aboard

I made the switch about 6 months ago and I will never go back. I bought a iMac for our kids and now I am saving up for a Mac Book. Originally I was going to partition the hard drive for XP but I had second thoughts when I found out the computer would be then suseptable to the same Windows viruses I had just ran away from. I use Open Office for my spreadsheets and iWork as a word processor.

[Jackpine Radical]

8. Been living with the Macbook for about a week now.

I still use the ol' Toshiba for everything I haven't ported over, like all my text files. I'm having a blast exploring the Mac world. I got Quicksilver & am fumbling around with it. Also downloaded ThinkingRock & hope to get into more of a GTD life plan as I do this switch.

What widgets do people find most useful? Also I see that there is a regular Stickynote app & a Stickynote widget as well. When would I want to use the widget version, & why? The app version seems more useful overall.

[Poiuyt]

9. Personally, I never use widgets

My monitor is covered with browser windows, finder windows, word processing windows, etc. It seems that opening the "widget window" is more trouble than it's worth.

Maybe I'm missing something. I'm interested in how other people use them.

[moggie]

10. I don't use widgets much

Cute idea, but a lot of them seem fairly pointless. Ones which require no interaction are mildly useful: the ability to bring up various at-a-glance information with one keystroke. The ones I have:

iStat pro: so I can see what the system is doing
BBC Weather
London webcams: I'll shamefacedly admit that I sometimes use this to see what the weather's doing right now without looking out the window

Depending on your business, world clock can also be useful: you can have multiple instances of it running, each configured for a different timezone.

[133724]

11. A few suggestions:

1) check out Open Office @ www.openoffice.org it is platform independent (e.g. runs on Linux; Windoz & Macs

2) check out firefox (also platform independent & free)

3) check out sourceforge.org for other open source software.

4) check out GIMP (platform independent image program e.g.adobe photoshop also free)

I am sure the developers of these software packages would appreciate a small donation for their products...

[davidwparker]

12. "Or some other language?" - Applescript? Or, Objective-C if you get

adventurous. You can find programming books http://oreilly.com/">here.