Stuff I Like About My Mac

A little over a month ago I purchased a new MacBook to use as my primary computer. While I have worked with and around Macs since 1985, this is my first Mac as a primary computer. There is a G5 iMac on the desk next to me that our family has used as a household computer for several years, so I am not without recent Mac experience.

The migration from my ThinkPad has been painful at times but I have managed to find new and in most cases better ways to do things on the MacBook. There are still some business processes I am working on, but that is OK too because as my brother Bob says “you need to sharpen the saw” every so often or it gets more and more difficult to cut down trees.

So here are some or the applications and features that have stuck out for me over the last month or so.

OSX – Since 1986 I have been working with many different flavors of the Unix operating system. I am not an expert by any means, but being able to tinker around in Terminal when I am not able to figure out how to do what I want in the GUI is nice.

Cmd-F3 – I have some pictures I really like that I use as desktop wallpaper, and it sure is nice to be able to seem them with a single keystroke. Well, that and I keep documents that I am working on and need to access quickly on my desktop, so getting to my desktop quickly is nice.

JungleDisk – A software utility that allows me to back-up to the Amazon S3 cloud. The cool part is that the back-up is then accessible just like a local disk. With a fast internet connection and reasonable sized files you hardly even notice the lag. Because I used JungleDisk to backup the old ThinkPad I have been able to not move all “My Documents” files to the MacBook. This way the MacBook Documents folder is a fresh start and finding things is much easier.

VMware Fusion – Being able to run a virtual Windows session that actually works and allows all the programs that have no Mac alternatives makes it possible for me to carry only one computer. I still sell a fair amount of ColorMetrix software and that runs only under Windows. I use QuickBooks to run my business and while there is a Mac version, that version does not have the ability to export a file for sharing with my accountant. I program dongles and as of now the dongle provider only has a Windows based program for doing the programming. I build custom reports for my ColorMetrix customers and that process requires a version of CrystalReports that runs only under Windows. Without a robust virtual machine emulator like Vmware I would still have two computers and sometimes have to carry both of them.

Blackberry Desktop – About a month after I purchased the MacBook RIM released the Mac version of their Desktop software. It just works and seems to work faster and more smoothly than the same package on the old StinkBook.

SplashID Desktop – I have about a bazillion passwords to keep track of and for me nothing works better than SplashID which I have been using for several years going back to my Palm Treo. These guys have kept up with the times and now have a Mac Desktop to go with the Blackberry version of the software. Sync’ing the two is a bit tricky at this time, but it works. It’s nice having access to all the passwords on my desktop or anywhere anytime in my Blackberry.

iCal – The connection with Google calendar which I have depended on for several years now is amazing. With proper sync’ing on my part my calendar is up-to-date and viewable just about anywhere.

I am sure I have missed a thing or two, but this pretty well sums up the things I like most at this point.

What do you like about the machine you are using?