The one thing I do know is that in the last week, I have suddenly grown an appreciation for my iMac.
As I mentioned a few months back, we managed to get our department head to authorise a new iMac for us to push out our iPhone app with. While I did toy with the idea of using a virtual machine to do so, in the end I decided that if I were to ever pursue this seriously, not knowing Apple's products intimately would be my downfall. After a little bit of back-and-forth about which model and what features, we decided on something that everyone could be happy with. It took quite a bit of time to get it here, set up and on the network, so I spent my free time boning up on Objective-C.
I was not entirely new to Mac OS before this point, but it was definitely not something I was comfortable with. I dated someone who swore by Macs and had messed around on a couple of Powerbooks in our time together. It was alien, and like most people, I didn't like being taken out of my comfort zone.
That feeling spread as I tried to get used to XCode and Objective-C and after a week, I was more than happy to ditch the iMac for a while to work on some promotional material for upcoming events and new features on our Android app. I didn't even turn the iMac back on until this past Monday.
During that interim, we had to re-write a significant portion of our Android app due to the problems with our website, which it was running on top of. In the end, it was a good thing we were forced to change, as it lead to a lot more exciting possibilities and a solid API to work off of for any of our mobile applications. We may be doing a Blackberry app in the near future, by the by, so the easier to get all the information we need, the better.
Over the weekend, we had a huge problem with one of the drains outside of our store, to put it lightly. Coming in on Monday, you could smell the problem right away. Our store had flooded and the water had been sitting there all weekend, soaking into anything and everything it could. My office was the second worst damaged and the smell was enough to make you faint. We discussed what I needed to continue working and the decision was unanimous: the iPhone app.
While picking and choosing what we would take to my new temporary office, I opted to only bring the iMac, as it was a lot easier to set up, required less desk space and was necessary for what I needed to do. This meant, however, that I would be dropped face-first into OSX and have nowhere to run.
I have to tell you, it was the best thing that I ever did.
I previously had been following parts of Ray Wenderlich's tutorials trying to set up the app with little understanding and mediocre success. That isn't to say Ray isn't good at what he does; I actually highly recommend him to anyone looking to get into iPhone game programming. His website is raywenderlich.com, his twitter is @rwenderlich and his book(s?) can be found on Amazon. For those who are making their own assets, his wife's blog is a good starting point. Her links are vickiwenderlich.com and @vwenderlich, respectively
The trouble wasn't Ray, it was me. I was highly resistant to everything about the process and dismissed things as 'dumb' when they didn't seem intuitive. I have since learned the error of my ways, and he has a very good basis for how to set things up within your class structures. The information is there that I needed, I just couldn't see the trees for the forest.
After the initial learning curve of the new OS, I actually started realising that the way it was all set up was startlingly good. The only thing I haven't gotten used to is how easy it is to lose windows behind other windows. I'm a little bit of a desktop junkie and keep exactly 1 million things open at a time, so it's not too hard, haha!
The only thing I've found myself scrambling for are the keyboard shortcuts I've become so accustomed to. CMD+A, CMD+C, CMD+X and CMD+X are all fairly easy to figure out but print screen was completely absent from the keyboard. F5 doesn't refresh my page, XCode doesn't follow the usual function key debugging I'm used to and forget about ALT+130 for my accented e.
Print screening on the Mac is actually somewhat convoluted, but also rather intuitive. My favourite method is CMD+CTRL+SHIFT+4, which brings up a selection crosshair. Using that, I can clip exactly what I want out without having to use image editing software. It copies straight to the clipboard, ready to go. There are other key combos that do an automatic save as well, but I'm trying not to junk up my desktop too much.
Accents for typing are found using OPTION and various letter keys. To get my accented e, OPT+E gives me the accent and whatever letter I hit following is the letter it will put it on, in this case, e. It also works for uppercase letters, which is a helluva lot easier than remembering separate codes for everything. Typing in other languages on the Mac is a lot easier than on Windows. Oops.
There are still a few snafu's that I'm stuck on, like how the file structure is set up, how to figure out where things were saved, how to access the SD card I put in and how to create a new, blank file in GIMP. I honestly can't wait until I get CS5 approved to use on this machine, but I'll save that rant for another day, haha! Finding free software has been a little bit of a task and the singular time I searched for it, the moment I hit 'enter', the earth started shaking! (We're okay, the office is okay, but man that was startling!)
Overall, at the end of the week, I'm rather pleasantly using my iMac. The mouse doesn't give me as many fits, and the softer key sounds and scrolling noises all somehow add to the aesthetic. It feels a lot more... polished, I suppose. I feel as if somehow I'm a traitor for saying so, ha! But it's true. If nothing else, the iMac package is a well designed package and everything feels very good.
No one has to know I've been entertaining the idea of buying a Mac for my home use.
No comments:
Post a Comment