Personal Computing: MacBook Day 3

I've only just picked up my MacBook for the day; too much real work do to!

Seriously though, my next issue is to decide how to edit my standard word and spreadsheet documents.  I've installed the latest version of OpenOffice and it works fine.  At least, it appears to work fine on simple documents.  Who knows how it would work on some of the more complex documents I work on.  So what are the options:

• Office 2008 for Mac - chargeable
• OpenOffice
• Office 2007 for Windows under Fusion (or other)
• iWorks

Any other options?  I'm happy to take other suggestions, but at first, I think Office under Windows seems to be best choice.  

Personal Computing: MacBook Day 2

So, second day with my MacBook and I've started to look at application transparency between Mac and Windows.

On a positive note, I managed to get DropBox working (easily) and MindManager for Mac - all my mind maps are directly compatible.  I didn't expect I would have a problem but it's good to see compatibilty sensibly implemented.

For major Office documents, I'm looking at OpenOffice or MS Office for Mac (however I don't like the idea of paying for the same product on multiple platforms.  

If I can get consistency in my standard data formats, then I can see me being more confident about using cloud applications to store data.  That's a good thing as I'm trialling a number of products and would want to see the platform become irrelevant as long as the applications are good.  The only issue with that is having a continual reliance on an Internet connection; but that's achievable anyway.  

So far, products I've got happily working cross-platform;

• DropBox
• NetNewsWire/FeedDemon
• MindManager
• TweetDeck
• Exchange Email

Next challenges will be the Office installation, address and calendar (and decent synchronisation) and my favourite challenge, P2V'ing my "work" laptop (i.e. a machine I have to use to access a corporate network I use).  If I can virtualise that machine and transport it around, I may be able to bin my Windows laptop entirely.

Personal Computing: MacBook Day 1

For those who don't follow me on Twitter, today I "upgraded" my laptop to a shiny new MacBook.  If you are interested, it's the 2.4Ghz version with 4GB of RAM.  Enough of the specifications, how am I finding it so far?

I'm reminded of the time, many years ago (15+) I started to use Unix.  Previously I was a mainframe guy (professionally) and had used many different PCs - Amiga, Spectrum, Oric, BBC Micro, ZX-81, to name but a few, so change was never an issue.  However in a work environment, Unix was radically different.  In particular, I loathed the command line and the awful vi editor.  

Curiously I find myself in a similar position today.  I'm confident to say I know Windows pretty well.  In fact, after using the MacBook for a couple of hours, I realise I understand Windows intimately.  It is slightly unnerving that (a) I don't know where to find things (thx Storagebod for a few pointers) (b) I have no idea how best to organise the device I have just purchased.

This is an interesting situation to be in and in many ways reflects on my professional work.

Think about when you buy a new storage array; at that point you probably don't understand the intricacies of how it should be configured when taking into consideration best practices, standards, performance and so on.  That's one of the benefits of having help when deploying new technology.  It shortcuts that learning process.

Another thing that occurs is how much data I store online; Newsgator; RTM, DropBox to name but a few.  Perhaps cloud storage has been there for a lot longer than we think.