Switch
As previously blogged I recently joined the gSkinner team. Since I had a clean slate as far as hardware was concerned I decided to swich to using OS X and get a new PowerBook 15″ 1.67 ghz. This blog is about my experience so far.
There is no question that Macromedia products are more refined on the PC. Flash on OS X lacks the tabbed windows and the response of the application is frumpy. The side panels (Library especially) are painful to work with. The editor is also slow and is not smart enough to turn off antialiasing on small type. So I have been using BBEdit for my actionscript editing and I like it very much. Dreamweaver tells a similar story, although it’s editor is more refined. It took a while to get use to the environment which caused me stress when I wanted to gets things done.
That being said, I operate in a mixed environment where some of us use macs and some use windows and we are able to share and collaborate quite easily. It is amazing to me that (other than the performance issues) Flash is so seamlessly cross platform when it comes to sharing source code.
I have started to evaluate Eclipse for Flash development. Immediately I find things I am missing in the editor. But I am reserving judgement until I can use it a bit more.
Third party applications still seem a little rough around the edges. Apple’s own apps are amazing in terms of spit and polish. The “lickable” look and feel gets a bit too much at times.
Overall, my first two weeks had me cussing that I switched, because it was painful. But since then things have settled down and I am productive once again and slowly exploring all the new capabilities of this computer.
