Last week I ordered a macbook pro (2.6Ghz - 4GB RAM - 200GB/7200RPM HD) through the shop.

It took about 10 days to arrive. I found that the process was ok but there is a little bit less communication than when I ordered from Dell. It will come as no suprise that the packaging was very well done :)

I ‘ve been using it for the last couple of days. It took me some time to get used to the different keyboard shortcuts that’s for sure.

I’m happy with my purchase but I do wonder what the harm is in providing a separate home and end key. If somebody knows how I can get a consistent word selection going ( I mean like ctrl - arrow or shift - ctrl - arrow) that would be of great help because that’s what annoys me most. I set up a full copy of vista on my bootcamp partitition, it had to be the 32-bit so I can’t take full advantage of my 4GB of ram, but that’s the way it has to be because otherwise fusion won’t load my boot camp partitition.

I first tried with a copy of vista I generated with the vlite tool I blogged about earlier but it appears that the full version actually runs faster than the lite version I generated. This will probably be mostly because of my own stupidity than the tool. With the full version I could install all the software from the bootcamp cd which may be why it works faster.

The next couple of days were spent bonding with my new macbook. Being pleasantly surprised that visual studio 2008 with resharper runs at a really acceptable speed for day to day development through fusion with unity turned on. I’ll probably boot into windows when I have to do purely .NET development.

And now I did want to know of textmate is as good as they say it is or if it’s just hype for nothing. I’ve been using textmate the last couple of days for doing some ruby development and i have to admit that while it’s no visual studio for c# it’s definitely an enjoyable experience. I still have to memorise a lot of shortcuts but I’m well on my way :)

Simone’s post on 18 almost free applications for Mac OSX got me everything I needed. I downloaded 2 or 3 extra programs. Like simone I’m trying to go as much native mac apps as possible. So far I have everything I need and need my windows box only for windows related development tools like LightSpeed, LLBLGen, SQL Server and Visual Studio etc.

7zX or something along those lines for zipping and unzipping 7z archives.
MacFUSE and NTFS-3G for mac OSX so that I can mount read/writeable NTFS volumes.

Another thing I wonder is if there maybe is a tree for navigating in finder. I’m having a hard time compiling IronRuby on OSX but I also haven’t really that hard yet.

Thanks to Simone I wrote this blog post with Ecto. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to connect to a windows vpn and remote desktop in there to fix up some servers.

My first week as a mac user was a success :D