I just bought a 12 inch Powerbook.  It will be interesting making the transition from Windows to the Mac.  I won't be leaving Windows for good, because game development kind of requires you to spend a lot of time on Windows.

Yes, I know, you should be developing games cross-platform, but that's not the point of this post, we'll get into that later.

My goal is to use the Mac for everything that is not directly related to developing my game.  I still have a Windows machine at home, but that will make the move to the office (once I get one) and I'll be left with only the Mac at home.

Why did I switch?

In a nutshell?  I'm sick of Microsoft.  I'm tried of crappy software and I'm tried of a style-less GUI (not in the sense of CSS, but in the sense of "you got no...").  What really made me start to despise Microsoft was all the web development I've been doing lately and realizing how screwed up IE is, and worse, how much Microsoft could care less.

I made the switch to Firefox for browsing and and have not looked back.  I then moved to Thunderbird for mail and was blown away at how good these two tools were.  I was a big user of Netscape back in he day, but switch to IE when they lost there way.  I've tried several browsers since then, but they all seemed so bloated or "sharewareish".  Firefox and Thunderbird are different beasts.  They are nice clean applications that are almost ready for prime time (I'll get into why I say "almost" in another post).  If you not using them now, switch.  If for no other reason than to give MS a wake up call.  Microsoft is the worst kind of company.  Most people think Evil companies are the worse.  No, lazy companies are.  I don't think MS is evil, they are just big and lazy and complacent.  They are screwing everyone over because they don't care anymore.

Anyway... back to my story...

After switching to Firefox and Thunderbird, I downloaded OpenOffice.  Once again, I was very impressed.  It did everything I needed for creating documents and spread sheets, so why deal with Microsoft BS when I don't have to.  I was now 100% Microsoft clean... well... almost.  I was still using XP.

Switching to Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice was not only easy, it was FREE.  Switch to the Mac was not going to be free.  Despite my best efforts of convincing the nice people at the Apple store that it would be in their best interest to give me a Powerbook, I was forced to buy one.

I decide to go with a 12 inch because I was going to mostly use it as a desktop machine hooked up to the monitor.  Getting a 15 inch would have been a waste.  I also wanted something that was very portable if I needed to work remotely.  I added 256M of memory and I was set.

I am no stranger to the Mac.  I got my first Mac in 1985 and used it for everything except game development until around 1992.  The original Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island designs were all done on a Mac, plus Lucasfilm's email system ran on UNIX and the Mac, so to get email I could have a Mac on my desk or a UNIX terminal.  Windows was no where to be seen back then, nor was the popularized Internet.

When I started Humongous Entertainment, I left my Mac behind, and other then using other peoples, I was Mac less.

After all these years, it will be interesting to see how it goes.  I've done a lot of web and server work on Linux and BSD over the last few years, so it is nice to have a real OS under-the-hood.  I think this is one of those things that MS never "got".  Geeks love the command line, they can run circles around anyone on a GUI.  Why Windows didn't have a kick-ass CLI, I will never know.  The CLI that comes with XP is little more then DOS.  The new CI that is supposed to ship with Longhorn is much improved, but they just gummed it up with a bunch of OOP crap.  Once again, MS fails to understand the power of the pipe.

I am compiling a list of issues I'm having with the Mac in relation to transitioning from Windows.  I'll post that in a few days.  I know the people at Apple are probably dying to hear what I was to say.  After-all, they listened to me so well when i was complaining to them several years ago about how they poorly they supported game developers.