Made the Move to Mac

I have been using Windows now for nearly 20 years and PCs for over 25. This October my Dell refused to come out of standby mode, which forces me to reboot every single time I leave the building with my laptop. After all those years of blue screens, hanging on large PowerPoint presentations, hanging on network connections, waiting for the laptop to come up when I press the On button, I finally gave up. I ordered a Mac.

I would say half of Alfresco now have Macs. Matt Asay must own Apple shares as he has been the key sales person for all those Macs. The sales organization in the US all have Macs and a lot of the developers are now transitioning to Macs. A lot of our customers are also using Macs. When you look at the pain of transitioning to Vista versus just leaving Microsoft behind, it becomes a much easier decision.

I must say the transition hasn't been too difficult. The first thing you notice is how much faster the Mac is for doing all sorts of things. Coming out of sleep is so instantaneous that it seems like it was on all the time. The user interface takes a little getting use to, but it doesn't look as bad as moving to Vista. Transferring files is much faster. Upgrading to Firefox 3 beta at the same time has made web browsing much faster than before. I am using ChronoSync for synchronizing backups and Vienna for RSS reader. I haven't decided yet between MS Office for Mac, Apple’s iWork or NeoOffice (Open Office). This is my first blog using my new Mac.

During the last 25 odd years, I used Macs and Unix systems in addition to my PCs and laptops. I have been using Unix for over 30 years now and still can use Vi and write amazing shell scripts. When we started Documentum, my desktop machine was a Mac for writing and formatting the business plan and I owned a Mac SE for home use. I have also used Unix systems, mainly Suns and HP, side by side with my PCs and Macs for a very long time. Before that, we all multitasked on Vaxes and even PDP-11s while I was at Berkeley. I still find that I can do more with c-shell, sed, grep and awk for managing and finding information than I ever could with a drag / drop interface. It's nice to get some of that back.

I actually heard the CIO of a major US government agency say they were considering moving to Macs or Linux. The lock-in of new file formats and features in Office Vista were a concern for them. Between that and the user interface and file format issues of the new Microsoft systems, won’t a lot of people be looking back at the last couple of decades and saying "Why?"

Comments

[Eddie]

Hi,
I'm a recent Mac convert but have had no luck in getting Alfresco Community 3.2 to install!
On starting up Alfresco & point at http://localhost:8080/alfresco I get a Tomcat 404.

The error in the logs is: "Ensure that the 'dir.root' property is pointing to the correct data location." despite the start up logs correctly reporting earlier that "The Alfresco root data directory ('dir.root') is: /Users/myname/Alfresco/alf_data"

Any clues?

Still, great product!

Eddie

[John Newton]

Just thought I’d say hello, seeing that we have our name in common. Glad to see that you are also a Mac user!

[russ danner]

I recently switched over to a Mac as well. I don't think I'll ever look back :) I <3 my mac :)

[Dan Phillips]

Congratulations John! We love Alfresco at Other World Computing almost as we love macs :). We are a supplier of Mac Upgrades.

Come check is out
http://www.macsales.com
Dan Phillips
IT Manager

[Sim]

Great news John. If you had walked in the office here a few years ago to show Alfresco with a Mac it would only have had an even greater impact! Just for the record NetNewsWire is now for free if you want to try something else as Vienna for your RSS feeds...

[Partners in Grime]

Excellent. Welcome back to Mac.

[Bill]

Good choice. Many of the guys in my group have converted to Macs as well. Most of us use MS Office, and Entourage has replaced the Palm Desktop for me. I also use Toast. I have a Pro Tower.

[BryanSD]

I spent most of the time on my "day job" working with Windows XP and Linux/Unix systems. After going through the frustrations of Windows 3.1 through Windows ME...I've been more then content with Windows XP. In the past couple years the Linux desktop has really improved and I see little need to move over to a Mac for a non-Windows experience. I already get that experience with Linux!

It is home where I think frustrations for both Windows Vista and Linux is mounting...and why Mac's growth will continue on upward. Sadly the Vista PC I've been using the past year continues to be much slower and buggier than the old XP PC it replaced. After dealing with the frustrations of Windows Vista...we finally bought my photographer wife her first Macbook Pro (she's happy).

I took my wife's lead in her freedom from Windows and reformatted my old laptop to Ubuntu Linux (happily using it now). But even though using a Linux desktop is what I consider equal to a Mac...the install experience was not. I spent three days installing Linux on the laptop due to LAN/WLAN/Kernel issues. I can only imagine what the non-IT person goes through when installing Linux at home!

I think Apple's biggest selling point in the future won't be so much the desktop...but the ease and efficiency their operating system works on their hardware. I'm convinced Vista doesn't have a prayer to catch up with the Mac's performance. Linux could have a chance, but not until more PC makers such as Dell install Linux for the consumer. At least for the next few years, this Windows/Linux guys bows to the genius of Steve Jobs and company.

[Greg]

Welcome back! I think you are going to enjoy running OS X and you can also run XP or Vista on your new Macintosh as well if you get home sick.

[Alexandra Larsson]

Welcome aboard!

Glad to hear that both you and the team use Mac a lot. The future for Mac-users look brighter than ever.

I just hoped that Apple would bundle Alfresco in Mac OS X Server. Wouldn't that be great? Maybe a call to Steve :) ?

[sunflower]

Welcome! (OK, so I actually use both).

There are several great OS X only writing apps out there. You may wish to broaden your search a bit before settling.

For example check out Virginia Heffernan's excellent article she penned for the New York Times on switching from Word to Scrivener on OS X.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06wwln-medium-t.html