DotNetSurfers

I have had my MacBook Pro for a year now and it’s my primary machine both at work and at home. I have since upgraded it with 8GB RAM (which has come down in price by more than half in the last 9 months) and a 160GB SSD. At my day job, I work with Visual Studio inside a VMWare Fusion VM and have been pretty happy with the performance. Here are some accessories that I have found useful for my MBP:

1. Screen Protector: I bought the glossy screen MBP, and that turned out to be a big mistake since I  frequently hack at coffee shop/restaurant patios and the glossy screen made the code unreadable. This Moshi iVisor screen protector fixed that and gave the screen a matte finish. It was also very easy to apply without any air bubble issues.
2. Keyboard Cover: I bought the keyboard cover after it showed up in my Amazon recommended products list (probably because the screen protector is from the same company), and I have been pleasantly surprised with it. It is quite thin and does not take much time to get used to. It has also already saved me from serious trouble once when I spilled Diet Coke on the keyboard.
3. Spare Apple MagSafe Power Adapter: I haven’t been able to find a good docking solution for the MBP, but carrying a spare power adapter saves me the trouble of crawling under the desk every day to plug/unplug it.
4. Apple MagSafe Airline Adapter: I have already flown to India (>20 hour flying time) twice this year, and the airline adapter is a lifesaver for such long flights. Just make sure you get a seat with a power port (I use www.seatguru.com to choose good seats), and you are good to go.
5. mStand Laptop Stand: I use this at home, and find it to be quite elegant looking. It also has a gap at the front for easy access to the laptop lid for opening/closing.

I have been meaning to check out the HyperMac external battery, looks like a great product if you go to conferences frequently, or are a road warrior. If any of you have tried it out, please do leave a comment about your experience with it.

When I recently purchased a Macbook Pro, I had a couple of options to set up my .Net development environment on there. I could use a Virtual Machine based solution such as Parallels or VMware Fusion, or run Windows natively using BootCamp. My first preference was to stay inside the Mac OS if possible. I spent some time researching which product other developers are having more success with and Fusion seemed to be  more stable and responsive for the majority of them. I downloaded the trial version from their website and took it for a spin, and have been really happy with it.

I have used both XP and Windows 7 in a VM with Fusion, and the performance has been pretty flawless. I allocate both processors, 40 GB of hard disk space and 2 GB of RAM to a VM. Some of my peers have long been advocating the advantages of developing using VMs, and now I totally get how cool this way of working is. I can create and restore snapshots at any point of time, create a new VM to try out any beta software, and keep my development environment isolated from softwares/utilities that it does not need (avoiding software bloat). I am using a Windows 7 VM right now for the most part and playing around with Visual Studio 2010 on it. I intially found the Unity feature in Fusion (it gives the illusion of running Windows apps natively on the Mac OS)  to be really cool, but I don’t really use it much. I have dedicated a Space to my VMs, and tend to work in full screen mode.

If you end up going the same way as me, I would recommend looking at multiple vendors before purchasing Fusion. I bought if off Amazon, and it cost me $23.49 (including a $10 mail-in rebate). Other sites,including VMware, offer it for upto $80.

It all started when I got my new IPhone (3gs) about a month ago. I had been using a Nokia E71 since the start of this year, and have owned a couple of Windows mobile based phone before that. To describe my experience with the new IPhone briefly, its usability and slick interface just blew me away. I could not believe I had missed out on owning this marvellous device for so long. My previous cell phones offered most of the features that my IPhone does, but there’s a big difference in the user experience. It would not be a stretch to say that the IPhone serves most of the functions that I had recently bought a netbook for. After playing with some really well designed IPhone apps (facebook, tweetdeck etc), I really wanted to check out the development environment and get familiar with the basics at least. Unfortunately, you can develop an IPhone app only on an Intel based Mac. When I dug for more information on the interwebs, I discovered that a bunch of other .Net developers have been using a Mac as their primary workstation for quite some time using either Bootcamp or a VM based solution such as VMware Fusion or Parallels. I decided to take the plunge and ordered a 15 inch Macbook Pro with a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4 gigs of memory and a 320GB 7200 rpm hard disk. Here’s my experience so far with the new Macbook Pro.

To put things in context, my primary workstation at home right now is a Dell desktop with 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 6 gigs of Ram and running the latest 64 bit Windows 7 RC. I am very happy with the that machine and use it with a dual monitor setup (see image below, the one on the right is a an Asus netbook).

To get upto speed with my new Macbook Pro, I shut down the Windows based desktop completely and have been using the Macbook as my primary computer for more than a week now. The device itself is a pleasure to use and looks very slick. I like the spacious keyboard and am really digging the trackpad. It has excellent battery life (>5 hours) in my usage so far. This is the most responsive machine I have ever owned. It takes around 2 seconds to revive the system from sleep mode, and unlike my Windows experience, I do not have to keep an eye on memory and processor usage all the time. I do prefer desktops over laptops for working for longer time periods because a laptop forces me into a slouching posture and puts more strain on the wrists. I tried to find a good docking station for the Macbook but was mostly unsuccessful. The only docking station I found was from BookEndz which had mixed reviews and a very high price tag (~$300).  I ended up buying a lapstop stand instead and currently attach my 20″ monitor, ergonomic keyboard and trackball when working at home. On weekends, I usually work from a coffee shop and carry the laptop around with me. I tried pairing the Macbook with my 24″ monitor, but it did not feel comfortable to use due to the big difference in screen size. Here’s a picture of my updated setup.

The Leopard OS is pretty easy to get used to. I did have some trouble initially understanding how applications are installed and kept on launching them from the Downloads folder rather than copying them to my Applications. I like the Spaces feature and it gives the experience of a larger screen area. I use different spaces for the Windows VM, web browser, chat/twitter clients right now. The biggest issue I am facing right now is constant switching between the keyboard and mouse/trackball. On windows, I use slickrun and any available shortcuts to keep my hands on the keyboard as much as possible. I found a great free app called Quicksilver for the Mac which is an application lancher (and more). Other useful applications are AppZapper (application uninstaller), Adium (chat client) and Textmate(text editor). For editing blogs, I am using a free editor called Qumana right now. I have always used the Firefox plugin FireFtp for FTP purposes, and the same suffices for my needs right now.

I have installed the IPhone SDK and am checking out Objective C and the XCode IDE right now. I plan to write another post soon describing how I set up my Windows development environment on the Mac soon. Stay tuned.