yeah thats it bob, I read what you had to say and I thought even for you it was lame.

I rest my case...read the first few sentances of my post and replied immidiately.

actually, I didnt read all of that post because it wasnt all there the 1st time was only this line


I gotta get to mountains and dont have time to answer all of this but

you better take a look then, as far as I can tell you can tweak the bejesus outta mac.


you can run most any webserver off a mac, ever hear of a xserver? not sure bout ms though but their virtual server is supposed to work very well. Yeah you can put 3rd party vid/sound cards in, you obviously havent looked at a mac in a long time scott, i was same way, it's a lot diff now... awhole new great world

Cool - see - I told you I hadn't looked at Mac in a long time.

I'm always up for trying new stuff. The only thing that will keep me from getting a Mac will be that I will actually have to go out and buy one now. I can't use any of the myriad of different pieces Ihave lying around here to build a test system like I do for all the flavors of Windows/Linux I play with.

No - never heard of XServer - but will check it out. Is that a webserver or the DB? Not TOO concerned with that, but would be nice to play with...

Somebody is going to have to steer me in this though cuz this is TOTALLY new...can I just go to EBay and buy a cheapo used Mac to test with? I don't wanna spend more than like $200-$300 on this "play" thing right now - cuz at this stage that's all it will be - a play thing. For $200-$300 will I be able to try out all this new stuff? The new OS etc? I'm not really too worried about the video card/sound card thing now cuz that's for gaming and 99% of the games I play won't run on a mac anyway so it would just be a dev box, as such I don't need all the video power.

Does Macromedia make a port of Dreamweaver, Flash & Fireworks for Mac?

VS.Net won't run on a Mac...hrmmm...

I also use Ultraedit for most of my text editing...what's the Mac equivalent of that?

Wonder how much developing I'll actually get done on a Mac...

If you dig on ebay you may be able to find something that cheap, although you may want to consider a Mac Mini also...

http://www.apple.com/macmini/

Yes, Macromedia makes their entire suite for Mac as well as Windows. You can even run ColdFusion on Macs. I'm happy to say with recent improvements I'm almost back to only using PCs when I'm paid to use them

As far as TextEditors, like with everything else, everyone is going to have a personal preference, but one of the best text editors is BBedit, which has a free version called TextWrangler

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml

I've actually found I've been more productive on my Mac than my PC. If there are any other tools you use that you want to know Mac equivalents for let me know.

--Bob

That really should be about it as far as apps go.

I am a .NET guy so I will HAVE to use VS.NET on my PC for that stuff. But I'll be happy to try everything else out on a Mac. I've tried most everything else on Linux and am just not as productive on Linux for one reason or another.

Might get the MacMini for my wife...if it's newer that what she currently has...she'll dig it...

Hey Scott.

XServe is the mac server platform. Probably the greatest looking rack i've ever seen (umm... SERVER RACK). It is VERY stable, matter of fact our backups all run on Mac Xservers now. Beautiful machine... even more so when you know how many terebytes each one of those puppies holds... so nice.

This is what your site's backups are being stored upon:
MAC XSERVE

This is the normal single user dedicated server:
Dedicated Server Xserver[/url]

VERY cool - learn something new everyday!

actually I am seeing a lot of games on macs now as well.

Scott, I bought (and if you get an older one its this one) a b&w (blue & white) on ebay for $70, threw on OS X, slipped in one of my extra harddrives (they only come with like 9gb ones) and added 256mb ram and its pretty amazing to see this thing go, for being 6 yrs old its on par with my p4 2.4 and has built in firewire and yada yada and when I got it it was loaded with with OS X, the adobe suite, Macromedia studio mx 2004, the whole shabang! hella deal!
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=14911&item=5761238825&rd=1


A mac will run a virtual server and windows very well as well, not like pc trying to run osx via pearpc or cherrypc

good blog
http://www.robrohan.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=cat&catid=A93E1B9B-F479-895F-F1FEEB79E0C5A708

Actually the mac is so cool for programmers because of all the cool things you can make now with AppleScript or Automator http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/automator/ and the dashboard widgets are really cool and the searching (spotlight) is amazing.

Macromedia stuff runs well, Adobe stuff runs well, remember jamies post that u yelled at me for about that? Truely, even on this old mac i click on a pdf and *BANG* its up, no waiting around for 5 minutes like on my pc, and the drawer makes it easy to navigate.
Then you get to all the photo & video stuff built in........ whoa!!

everything just seems better, like ftp (transport) is amazing, i am really liking mozilla camino for browsing.

And no rebooting and constant cleaning, virus scanning, spyware, really does let you get more done.

3 months ago I was thinking just like you scott, I loved linux but just couldnt do everything I wanted and I wouldnt even think about a mac, till katie made me look at hers and it was love at first sight

For the average user it comes with everything they need built in and there are very few programs I use to program with that i can't get on a mac.

The other thing I notice is that everything apple seems to make is very high quality.

ok now this is funny scott, you know what kills me? How good ms office works on a mac , really, it's amazing that its they made it better 4 a mac then 4 a pc, go figure & entourge is supposed to be the best email system ever but I havent tried it yet.

Well for MS Office this is how it's done...
Apple has people that coded Office from the ground up SOLELY for the apple systems. No porting anything over from the PC version. It was coded by guys who code ONLY for the MAC OS, and so they knew what to do and how to do it. The PC side of the software doesn't come in at all... not even a single line of code is taken from one for the other... it's really amazing.

Yep, that was back in the day when Kevin Browne headed up the Macintosh Business Unit. I'm not sure where they are going with Mac development these days... I haven't updated my copy of Office yet.

no wonder!

Yeah.

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

f you can get it to work, personally I thought cherry pc was easier to work with but neither one ended up working for me.