I’ll begin by saying, “I love my new macbook.” It’s pretty. It’s quiet. It’s a much faster computer than I’ve ever had. However, it hasn’t lived up to the high expectations about what I can do with it.
First the scariest part … On two separate occasions, my mac has stopped responding. The drive starts to rev up, like a Mission:Impossible letter bomb ready to blow up a city block. My desktop icons disappear. iTunes stops playing. The programs I am in stop responding … ALL of them. I can’t force quit. Twice, this has happened, and the mac is just a few weeks old.
Granted, I use computers in ways many people don’t. When I’m doing development, multiple applications are running at once (Firefox, Safari, Dreamweaver, FTP client, iTunes, Mail, sometimes Fireworks, too). If SQLyog had a mac version, that would be open as well. This problem could very well be just a matter of upping the RAM (didn’t have $$$ to do that out-of-the-box). But it’s still scary.
The more noticeable disappointment, though, is the nearly complete failure — in a practical sense — of the great you-can-run-OSX-and-XP-at-once promise. I pictured seamlessly spinning the desktop cube between Mac and PC screens, both working on the same web sites. My Mac was to be my main development platform, with the PC at the ready to handle SQL server and some other Windows-only applications I commonly use.
Uh-uh.
There are two big options right now, Mac’s Boot Camp and Parallels (both in “beta”). They don’t work together and require to separate installations of Windows XP. Boot Camp is a great little tool for partitioning the Mac hard drive (very easy!) and creating an opportunity to install Windows. It works fantastic, but there is no way to run both XP and OSX at the same time in that scenario. The best I can hope for is that I can convert my two laptops into one physical thing to tote around. With Parallels, a virtual machine is created for any other OS. There are a few more limitations and the processing isn’t quite as fast as with Boot Camp, but it is a very simple matter to be working on the Mac and quickly pull up Windows. The problem here is that, at present, there is no communication between the virtual XP boot and the physical Mac. So my vision of running local development sites with a SQL backend are shot.
My MySQL client of choice is SQLyog, which is far superior to some of the other database administrator tools. Unfortunately, it is a Windows-only thing, making it useless if I intend to do my development on the Mac. Ryan helped me get XAMPP working on my Mac, so I do have a full-blown web environment locally, but I am finding some of my other Mac tools a bit limiting (or at best, different). Cyberduck is the best free FTP I can find, but it seems to crash under duress and may be contributing directly to the M:I hard drive rev described above. And for all of Dreamweavers great beeps and whistles, I find it slower and more instrusive than the old Cold Fusion Studio or even HomeSite. My coding rhythm is off as a result, especially given the limited screen space (which could be addressed with an external monitor).
So here are my options:
- Wait for the Parallels upgrade in several months to a year that will allow the virtual machine to communicate with the local Mac HD.
- Code on the Mac as best I can and allow Windows to be a sort of safety net for SQL work
- Use Boot Camp and keep my web development in a windows context
I’m seriously considering that last one … especially if it is possible to use Parallels the other way: run XP natively and use a virtual machine to open up a Mac window for email, web and other things. Similar problems emerge, but having to set up email on my windows machine would not be one of them.
