Antair Games An independent game developer blog

Continued adventures in Mac Land…

My first week with my first Mac is up, and I’m very happy over here. Lots of little things have tripped me up or bugged me, but I like the machine a lot, and I like Mac OSX a lot too.

First thing I noticed was the size of the thing. Andrey told me to get the big one, but since I’ve spent the last 3 years hunched over a 15″ laptop, I feel a bit intimidated looking up at a big 24″ screen. I’m not quite over that yet, but I’m getting there… maybe it’ll improve my posture.

Another obvious thing was the sound. My laptop was completely incapable of rendering bass sounds, so I’m loving the fact that the iMac has a nice sound system built in. It’s nice having all my music in iTunes, with the little remote and so on… I already feel like music is more accessible and it feels like I can make it a bigger part of my daily life.

Some of the obvious Mac things that are tripping me up: the way folders are replaced rather than merged when copied; the close window vs close app thing; the lack of support for the home and end keys (this one is killing me).

I’m really impressed with the keyboard, except for a couple of issues with the British layout: the @ key is on the number 2 (instead of above the right shift), and there’s no direct hash key (it’s alt-3, but it’s not shown on the key). For some reason I seem to miss with my shift presses, I’m getting a huge number of 9’s instead of )’s. Finger training should gradually eliminate all of these problems, but I don’t feel like much of a typist at the moment.

I’m less impressed with the mouse. The little wheel is nice, but the right button detection is just horrible. I’m getting the hang of it (you have to lift your left finger off the mouse before you press the right button to get a right click — the first few days I just thought I was going crazy until I realized that). I also need to train myself not to squeeze the mouse when I click, because I keep triggering the side button actions.

The general OS feels really nice and homely, aside from these little problems I feel very comfortable here already. I found a nice switching guide on the Tao of Mac - How to switch to the Mac, helped me with some of the basics. For a geekier perspective, I also enjoyed flicking through What is Mac OSX.

Special mentions also for the included software, like GarageBand, and Time Machine (seems great once you exclude all the system stuff that changes constantly). 

The bundled development software XCode also looks great. I haven’t done a great deal with it yet, but I found a nice looking intro ebook - Become an XCoder.

Also on the Mac development side, I found a great Mac game development community at iDevGames. I’m looking forward to having a good look around over there in the coming weeks.

My first week was largely overshadowed by good old Windows though. I tried virtualization using the free VirtualBox (thanks, Paul :)). It seems to work very well, but I decided virtualization wasn’t for me, and installed a full copy of XP using Boot Camp.

That was a challenge in itself. My XP disc is pretty old, and Boot Camp only supports Service Pack 2 or higher. Fortunately, there’s a nice solution called slipstreaming that allows you to add SP2 to a regular windows installation CD image, and then you can make a working XP SP2 installation CD. It took some time, mostly trying to find stuff I’d mislaid or moving things from one machine to another etc… but it worked.

NTFS support for the Mac was a bit of a pain, but once I got MacFuse and the NTFS driver, I have a really nice Windows machine here.

Aside from Windows trying to shatter my eardrums every time it starts up or shuts down (note to self: disable those sounds), using Windows on the Mac is great. I had my first productive day today in Visual Studio, even in spite of a seemingly endless update/restart loop this morning.

Our good friend Jon over at NGEdit deserves a mention here for his CodeKana software. It’s a Visual Studio add-in that changes the color of your code. It’s very difficult to explain why it’s so important, but it is, a fresh install of VS felt dead without it. If you use Visual Studio at all, I’d recommend giving it a try, I doubt you’ll want to live without it once your trial expires.

My main reason to have to go into Windows is Visual Studio and the Adobe Creative Suite stuff (which I’ll eventually get switched to the Mac). I’m expecting the rest of this week to be in Windows, but hopefully next week will have a higher OSX component.

That’s all I can think of so far. All things considered¬†I’m a very happy new Mac user, and I’m looking forward to migrating myself over as fully as possible.