Apple WWDC Preview
Apple are again running a series of seminars throughout Australia and New Zealand in a lead up to the World Wide Developer's Conference in San Francisco. I've registered to check out what they're doing at the Perth seminar.
It is running on Monday the 26th of June at midday for two hours and I'm interested in what the developer tools are like on a Mac. There's a chance we'll get MacBook Pros over the Thinkpads so it'd be interesting to know what's available.
I’ve played with the Xcode dev environment for a half hour, and came away impressed. Its not conceptually much different to Visual Studio, and has fewer features, but it’s pretty straightforward to use and get some C code bashed out. I’ve not used WebObjects, but I’ve read its what the Apple site and online store run on.
As for Macbook Pro… normal Macbooks have the same features and are half the price. Mel will be bringing home a white one in a few months.
When the invitaion email was sent out yesterday, there wasn’t a Perth event listed. I may have just missed it. Then again Apple have been known to change the content of these pages in the past (remember Matt?)
My (replacement) MacBook Pro arrived yesterday (long story) and I’ve started setting it up today. The company is a 100% Microsoft environment so it should be interesting to see how things go. Drop me a line if you’ve got any specific questions.
Where are you working now Jason, and what happened with the first MacBook Pro?
What are your thoughts on the machine, as I expect you’d be doing “similar” things to us with it?
And yeah, I remember them changing the page on us :)
Jason doesn’t write as much code as you do, so I expect the keyboard will be a bigger consideration for you than him. As for the software, you can put Ubuntu on them, either natively or inside Parallels (basically VMWare for MacIntel).
The first MacBook Pro functioned just fine. It was actually a problem with the latching mechanism which holds the lid to the body when it’s closed. From the experience, I learnt:
1. The staff at Apple’s physical service centres are monkeys.
2. Apple’s phone helpdesk is in Australia (unless they train their Indian staff to put on *really* good Australian accents) and the staff are very helpful.
3. If you time these things just right, you can get free processor upgrade. (Apple bumped up the specs of the 15″ a week after I sent mine back.)
I’m working for comapny that primarily provides data management solutions for industries in the mining and resources sector. I’ve been brought in as a fresh set of eyes to evaluate the internal IS/IT infrastructure, but so far I’ve been mainly been assisting in optimising exising, and creating new, data automation tasks.
Similar stuff: kinda. As there’s no *NIX boxes in the organisation it’s not so much shell scripts and PHP, as it is batch files and JScript (although I was tempted to start putting perl or php on boxes to keep in touch with “real” scripting environments.) The data management side of things also means a fair bit of SQL.
That said, as Hale suggests, I woudln’t write as much code as you. We don’t develop any applicaions in-house at the moment; we either leverage other tools or outsource development.
To get the most out of having a machine that runs OS X, I’m hoping to use a Parallels Desktop virtual machine to run only the applications which need to be run under Windws. In my case the SQL Server client tools (Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer Profiler, etc), Access, Outlook and a few others. There is always Boot Camp to run Windows natively, but I figure what’s the point of having a Mac if you’re going to treat it like a Windows machine? My biggest concern is getting my Windows Mobile 5 based i-mate K-JAMto sync to Outlook on the virtual machine via Bluetooth or USB.
I haven’t spent enough time with it yet to get a good feel for where everything is, but I suspect Gnome or KDE users will find the transition easier than Windows users like myself (I’ve ony ever used FreeBSD in console mode so it doesn’t count.) It’s been an interesting experience so far and I’ve been documenting things like shortcuts and option locations as I find them for my own personal use. If you fancy lending me some server space I could probably document the whole thing online as I go.
Jason: No problem about the server space. We’re happy to give our mates space :) Drop me an email and we’ll arrange it, and a domain if necessary.