I recently got the new MacBook Pro, and I am smitten. The form factor of the MacBook Air was what initially caught my attention after spending the last 16 years Mac-free. After seriously looking at the Macintosh line up I found several justifications for why I simply could not and should not spend another day without one. (The final tipping point was 18 months no interest from Best Buy - and this was after the credit crunch! I rationalized that by the time I had to actually pay for the thing I would have added at least that much value to my skill set.)
This is actually my first blog post from the MBP (as I fondly call it) using ecto.
After opening the (very cool) box and oohing and ahhhing over the ambient-light driven screen and keyboard lighting (you haven't lived until you've turned the lights off and on in a room with a MBP) I set about the task of becoming familiar with a very foreign environment.
I downloaded the following in very short order:
QuickSilver, Adium, Jing, Skype, Dropbox, TextMate, and VMWare Fusion.
Within days I had accomplished the "Windows on a Mac" experience. I did it the simple way for my first foray in the bi-platform lifestyle. I started with a Windows XP VPC created on my Dell. I will blog about the details later since that is not really the topic of this post.
My next project was XCode - the Mac development environment. To my great surprise and delight, Apple has relaxed the whole iPhone Development rigamarole ridiculousness and the entire process was easy (so far). I simply had to "Register" as an Apple Developer, and immediately in my inbox appeared an email with a link to validate my registration. I was then able to download the latest iPhone sdk with the iPhone emulator. The Apple Dev site contains tons of resources and before the day's end I had a small app up and running in the iPhone emulator.
With only 20 hours on it, the MBP had become my main laptop and I use it everywhere now - even for work at times. (Don't tell my boss... I think that may be a fireable offense!)
With that, I will end my first post from the MBP. (Actually, this is not the first post... I posted from livewriter running inside my Windows XP VM on my my MBP).