Another new MacBook post

So last November 30, I braved the Singapore IT Expo (SITEX) to purchase my first ever personal Mac. Almost a month prior to this, I had received my first Mac in the form of my work machine, a MacBook Pro, and after a lot of deliberation, have decided to purchase my own.

OS X Leopard If you want to see my first few thoughts on working with a Mac (and OS X), you can visit the aforementioned entry. The first few weeks of working with the “new toy” was exciting, if a bit nerve-wracking. As loadx correctly pointed out, I’m not a hardcore BSD (or any UNIX flavor) user, and I do rely heavily on Windows binaries for my PHP, Apache, and other geeky development application needs. Were it not for the sheer niftiness of the Mac, and the amazing colors, I would probably wailed about my choice for the work machine. I’m still learning the works, but so far I’m enjoying.

At the moment, I am:

  1. Learning the ins and outs of iPhoto.
  2. Hunting for a good LiveJournal client that’s up to par with Semagic.
  3. Re-assessing Mail; just because I use Mail for work, doesn’t mean I need to stick to it for my personal email.
  4. Needing to get another Windows license to set up dual booting.
  5. Still deciding about using iCal.
  6. Still hunting for a good personal finance application that will easily let me import my GnuCash data. Would prefer free, but depending on feature set, I don’t mind if I have to pay a bit.
  7. Loving Stacks Overlays.

There’s more, but those are the pressing things. Through the advice of a friend, I have also started using MAMP for my development web server. This is new to me: I’ve always installed Apache, MySQL, and PHP one by one. We’ll see if I get the itch to give myself a hard time and install everything one by one.

More insights on my new MacBook soon. I still need to decide on a name! Continued application suggestions are welcome.

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