• I still don’t like taking my fingers off the home row keys to use the touchpad. Two finger scroll is nice but really it’s not that much better than the scroll area on a normal touchpad. The large touchpad is definitely much more usable than the tiny one on my PC, but I still prefer the pointing stick (except for scrolling)
• The alt-tab vs alt-` thing is driving me nuts. I still haven’t figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between tabs in FF or Webkit.
• The menu bar system is totally messed up. Why does mail.app have to have the same menu bar for the main window as well as e-mail windows? I was using iPhoto and I had to click around until I could figure out why a menu item was disabled. Really frustrating and really bad UI.
• The whole concept of closing all the windows, but having the app still run is a mixed bag. Being able to alt-tab to apps which don’t have any windows open works sometimes, but sometimes it feels broken. At the very least, when you close the last window the app should move to the end of the alt-tab list.
• There isn’t a really good browser. Webkit is faster than firefox, but then firefox has the better featureset. Why is firefox so slow anyway? It’s plenty fast on my PC which is really slow compared to the mac.
• I miss my windows apps, namely GOM Player (kicks VLC’s butt), Picasa, Faststone image viewer, and Notepad++. It seems that lots of things which are now free on PCs still cost money on macs. Namely good image viewers and text editors.
• The 13″ widescreen is OK. It is almost the same width as the 15″ normal screen on my PC, but just not as tall. I always feel like it is not tall enough.
• Still getting used to keyboard navigation when editing text. Not as aggravating as it used to be, but still annoying.
• The anti aliasing is still bothering me.
• When Ayaan reaches up and grabs the lid of my PC, I just grab it and pull it back. When he grabs the lid of my mac I feel like it is going to snap in half.

Overall, if my PC is nearby I will use that. If my mac is around, I will use that. Not really feeling the “OMG Macs are so awesome” love yet.

• They are very trendy and “hip”, which usually makes things less attractive to me
• They are expensive, and my PC has been working pretty well for me
• I have workflows and a good environment set up on my PC, not to mention some expensive software (MS Office, Adobe Photoshop)
• I am used to using PCs…been using them since my dad bought us a 33mhz 486
• Any time I spend briefly on a mac drives me a little insane because of the keyboard shortcuts and other differences
• I am not a big fan of trackpads. I really like pointing sticks.

However, as of late, I have been flirting more and more with the idea of a mac. I finally decided to try one out:

• Most of the colleagues who I really respect for their engineering talent and intelligence love their macs
• I want to develop an iPhone app or two, and the only way to do it is with a mac
• My PC has been giving me a real headache as far as hardware issues. Software wise, it’s been fine but the hardware problems are starting to drive me up a wall…the computer is almost 3 years old now.
• Newer macs have really large touchpads with multitouch which seems like it could be better than using a pointing stick
• Apple says 50% of students are using macs. If this is true, it really says a lot about the long term prospects of the platform. Something developers, including myself, should be watching very closely.
• I need a mac to develop iPhone apps.

So the real reason I got one was out of necessity. I figured I would try it out as a secondary machine and see how I like it. I got a pretty sweet deal on a black 2.4ghz macbook. Well, lo and behold, my inner geek came out as soon as I opened the box; I started to settle in. Add / remove some dock icons, customize my terminal, set up mail and firefox, etc. I think I am going to try to use it as my primary machine.

Some initial observations:

• Macbooks don’t have home/end/pageup/pagedown buttons. I was not aware of this fact. So far it has not been an issue but once I start to do some real work I fear it might drive me up a wall.
• The text anti aliasing is a little weird compared to my PC. I think I am starting to get used to it, but if I pay attention it makes me squint.
• The keyboard shortcuts are really frustrating. Muscle memory is hard to break. Only after 4-5 hours I am finally remembering to hit command-L instead of command-D for the address bar in Firefox. Again, once I start doing some serious work, we will see how it goes. I think it can be overcome in a day or two with some perseverance.
• I love the fact that is UNIX under the hood. Being able to open up a terminal and have access to all the UNIX goodness is pretty awesome.
• I do like the touchpad. It is large enough to go across the screen in one swipe, and the multitouch behavior is very cool and convenient. Still getting used to right-clicking though.
• I still don’t know what I am going to do about my MS Office and Photoshop. There is always the last ditch option of bootcamp or a VM like Parallels / VMware…
• The screen is a little annoying…the viewing angle is really, really narrow. From what I have read, this is not an issue with Macbook Pros. Also the screen is a little on the small side. Very useable, but I think I would definitely benefit from the larger screen on an MBP.

So overall my experience has been pretty positive so far…a few grumbles here and there but I think it will be a good relationship. If I decide to stick with it, in a few months I may need to sell this macbook and upgrade to a unibody MBP for the 15″ screen. That remains to be seen, because one of my main gripes about macs is the price. A little deal hunting on eBay and craigslist can alleviate that problem. It’s also easier to justify the price when the new unibody macbooks seem like they are really well built.

Started a new job a few weeks ago with Aptela. They are a small company which provides business VOIP services. I am in charge of building and designing the UI for their web-based control panel as well as any upcoming consumer-facing applications. It’s been pretty interesting going from a huge corporation like AOL to a small 50 person company like Aptela. As with any job change, there is some adjustement, but overall I am pretty happy with the new position. There are a couple people there who I have worked with before so it helps with the transition.

All the work I am doing so far is in Flex, but I am already dabbling in SQL to analyze user metrics, and will also be learning Erlang, since it’s the language of choice for the back-end systems. Erlang is a functional language, and my only functional programming experience is a brief introduction to LISP about 9 years ago in college. It’s going to be fun learning some new stuff!

If you are interested in writing a Flash / Flex / Air application which leverages AIM, check out the Quick Start Guide. I haven’t received much feedback on it yet, so please let me know what you think!

Also remember, AIM isn’t just for IM. You can use the network for small data transfer which enables you to write multiplayer games that can do all communication via the AIM network. We have a Google Group set up, so please sign up and send out any questions you may have. We would love to hear from you!

Good luck and happy coding.

Second: It’s been a while since my last update, but I think I might have some material which will allow me to post more regularly. I’ve started playing around with Flex, and I think I might finally be able to come up with some stuff to write. While it’s easy to put together something that runs pretty quickly, it is also very powerful and you can get really involved with doing some more advanced things like custom layout, custom skins, etc. As I delve deeper into the Flex world I expect I’ll be working on some things which will (hopefully) be interesting to others as well.

Overall, though, it seems that the Achilles heel of Flex for general use in rich internet apps seems to be the lack of proper HTML rendering. Without this, any kind of product which wishes to render HTML content in their application is kind of left hanging. Flex supports a few select HTML tags, but even something basic like showing an inline image is not possible without some really nasty hacks. Quite a few developers have written about this problem, but I hope as I get into the platform a little more I can share some thoughts on things which are a little more original. It’s a good start though.

After using safari for a little while I really didn’t see anything that impressed me and would make me switch from IE7 or Firefox. Even though I know it’s a public beta, there are few things missing which really made me raise my eyebrows. There are almost no window borders. On an XP machine this can make the window get lost amongst the other applications. You can only resize the window from the bottom right, but even then the cursor doesn’t change to a resize indicator until you actually press down the mouse button. They say it’s faster than IE7 or Firefox but honestly the way IE and Firefox render pages seems to be “smoother” and less “choppy” than Safari…and Safari didn’t seem any faster. You can only download data so fast, correct? Also on my HP laptop I press both mouse buttons down at the same time to auto-scroll; this doesn’t work in Safari. And there are no tooltips! Bad bad bad! Releasing a brand new product (to windows users, at least), and you can’t even hover over buttons to find out what they do. I am sure Apple knows how important tooltips are for discoverability and exploration, and I am really intrigued that such an important feature was missed. I guess they figured since they only have 2 or 3 “ambiguous” buttons, it wasn’t worth the effort?

Anyway, otherwise it feels quick and smooth. I wouldn’t switch though. It will be interesting to see what happens with Safari for Windows, to say the least.