At Work On a Mac

For various reasons, mostly because the vast majority of business users are in a “Windows” environment, I also run Windows XP on my iMac (with Unix isn’t that out of this world?). All compatibility issues can be tested some applications that simply won’t run on  a Mac, can be installed. (and yes there are still fonts and Quicktime issues between the two platforms when exchanging multimedia files)

Trade software (stock exchange, financial analysis, legacy, third party utilities) developers often only cater to the largest market out there: the Microsoft hegemony. Although 

And the first one now
Will later be last

The Times They are A-Changin’. mostly because of the iPod’s and iPhone’s popularity, the design of the Mac and the overall flexibility and robustness of the Mac OS X feline releases. Tigers and Leopards are eating up market shares.

Read this fascinating article on Apple’s recent progression. The most dramatic aspect of their inroads are in the sales and profits they are making in comparison to Microsoft’s. In terms of OS installed base Microsoft has roughly ten times more but, in terms of profit, Apple is making a third of Microsoft’s (hardware and software combined). Microsoft is selling about 770,000 VISTAs a month and Apple is selling about 1 Million copies of Leopard monthly. Count me as both a Mac and Windows advocate when foes coexist… where do I fit in? I just think one should always consider the best tools for any given job, setting aside a priori opinion. I’m buyest for my personal computing but that’s another story. (end of intro I guess)

I picked Parallels over Bootcamp because I wanted the Mac to coexist with its PC foe to fight it out for CPU cycles. Yes this Mac is big enough for the “boot” of them. I recommend 1 Gig of RAM for Parallels as anything under that will make you wish you had chosen Bootcamp.

Leopard, Productivity bootcamp, Leopard, Parallels, running Windows on a Mac, Tiger, Vista, Windows XP

Still not convinced that you need Leopard, Apple’s latest Operating System (10.5)? You can watch this excellent video from Macworld explaining 4 different major improvements to iChat, the gauche Finder and Spotlight pair and Preview.

I think these improvements are definitely in line with being more productive on a Mac.

You can now do phrase searches in Spotlight in a tip of the Google iceberg style (a complete list of Google search operators can be found here) by putting your search terms between quote marks. You can also do quick calculations with 40 mathematical operators (geeks rejoice).

Preview allows you to annotate a PDF file on the fly and finally select its text. You can also do an alpha channel (transparency) just like in Keynote on images to detach the subject from the background. You can send an image directly to iPhoto.

iChat allows you to open multiple IM accounts at once, it has three levels of compacted views to squeeze more conversations in a given window. It can now record a voice chat and a video chat (great for podcasts).

Finally the Finder is improved with the possibility of displaying the path in the Finder window. I like the look of the new Finder and its ease of use. I especially like he way the Dock stacks up my downloaded files and my Applications. I really enjoy Spaces that enables multiple Desktops (stop laughing Linux fans).

For those who want multiple Desktops (upgrade or not) I recommend Desktop Manager, a neat little utility even more powerful than Spaces. Hope you enjoy these features, I recommend you upgrade to Leopard and do the upgrade to 10.5.1 immediately after. A clean install is the way to go, provided you have backed up your user folder previously.

Bookmark Essentials, Productivity 10.5, Desktop Manager, Finder, Google operators, iChat, Leopard, Macworld Video, new features, Preview, Spotlight, upgrade