[thelist] I'm gonna switch! I mean it this time!

Wade Armstrong wade_lists at runstrong.com
Fri May 17 13:23:01 CDT 2002


on 5/17/02 10:15 AM, Bill Haenel at bill at webmarketingworx.com wrote:

> I am considering getting rid of all of my PCs and buying new Macs in their
> place.
>
> Will I be happier with a Mac environment? What are the "watch out for this"
> and "but you'll really like this" things that go along with web development
> in a Mac environment?
>

I'll admit to being a Mac bigot, but I've gotta give this one piece of
advice:
Focus on the tools.

The OS is just a platform for the tools that help you get your work done.
Moving to a Mac may force you to switch some of your text editors, in
particular (Adobe, Macromedia, and MS Office products are of course
available on the Mac). Can you survive going from TextPad to BBEdit?
Probably so, but there will be a transition.

If the apps you currently use are available on the Mac, then, chances are,
you'll notice very little difference because vendors are usually pretty
energetic about making interfaces and feature sets equivalent across
platforms.

One thing you'll love: running Virtual PC on every Mac, with 5 or more
different virtual Windows and Linux set-ups each running a different browser
version (I know you can do it on Windows, but you need 2000 for that)

<tip type="Testing with Virtual PC" author="Wade">
Using Virtual PC (or something similar, like VMWare) to test your sites on
mutiple OS/browser combinations? Build yourself a baseline, bare version of
every OS, with nothing but the target browser installed. Keep that virtual
drive someplace safe, like a CD or a different folder on your hard drive.
Make a copy of it to run your tests on. Install anything you like on the
copy. And when you want to roll back to a base install (because you know you
can never assume anything about a user's set-up), just throw away your
much-futzed-with copy and make a new copy of the bare, baseline install.
Instant rollback, much easier than building a new, bare install when you
want to test without Flash installed.
</tip>




More information about the thelist mailing list