So my boss has gone and done something terrible to me. He's given me his old MacBook Pro for a project. The main reason why I think of this as a terrible thing is that I am absolutely loving it, and I am going to hate to have to wipe it if the project requires it. I have been a big fan of Apple and the Mac line since I inherited my first Macintosh Plus from my brother, back many, many years ago. While I have been a big Apple fan, my work has required me to mainly use Windows based machines as my primary device, but I think that I'm going to use this as a chance to try to move over to a Mac based solution. If I can work this and really move to it as a full featured work solution, I'm going to seriously think about making my next machine purchase a MackBook Pro, instead of a new iMac, and use one machine for work and home.
My plan for trying this out has required that I use (and find) some software that I know I will use a lot. This is the short list of things that I've installed so far:
ecto -- This is an application that Paul (my brother and ultimate boss at work) mentioned in a blog post and now I'm hooked. It looks like it supports Drupal (my home blogging platform) and Subtext (my work blogging platform).
CoRD -- In my role as a system administrator, I have to spend a lot of time logged into multiple machines. It's not really required, but I don't want to have to walk down to the server room for every little thing. I've been using this tool for a couple of hours now and it looks like it can handle everything that I need. It is a beta piece of software, but I always have Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection Client to fall back on. It's just not nearly as elegant.
Microsoft Messenger 7 -- The company I work for is primarily a Microsoft shop. With this in mind, and the fact that my official title is "Unified Communications Consultant," it's important for me to be able to stay connected with the people in my company. The reason why I am pointing out this tool is simply for the fact that version 7 of Messenger can connect to an OCS 2007 environment. This is cool, almost beyond belief.
Microsoft Office 2008 -- Okay, I'm sure no one is really surprised by this. With Entourage (which I still have to think about spelling correctly) and Word, this suite is a HUGE part of my daily work of technical writing. I've been using it at home for a while for schoolwork and a bit of this and that, but this is my chance to use it in the workplace as more than just a curiosity. Who knows, maybe if I use it and talk about it enough I might get selected for any beta programs for the next version of Office or Entourage!
Firefox 3 -- Once more, almost a no-brainer in the IT world. I don't know many people who don't have at least two, if not three web browsers installed.
VMWare Fusion -- This is just a ROCKING application! I don't have any VMs running right now, but if I get to use this as more than just a project clunker or if I decide to purchase one "for real," I'm going to follow these simple steps to put my current laptop's OS into a VM, and then I won't have to worry about Windows-only management tools!
As excited as I am, I know that there is a very real possibility that I won't be able to do everything that I need/want to do, since I'm going to have to use this to make money for 3Sharp. Along with that healthy dose of reality (it's not MY toy (; ) is also the very real limitation that this laptop only has 2GB of RAM. If I was doing nothing but surfing the web and using MS Word, this would not be an issue, but for example's sake, my current work laptop has 8GB of RAM (I use almost all of it, constantly), and I'm upgrading the drive to 320GB because I keep running out of room. With those warnings in hand, I'm still willing to give it a go. Now that I've really established my value to the company and to myself, I think I'm better prepared to do something like make a major purchase of Apple hardware. (Just for clarification, anything that I would purchase would have to be major, just to fit my RAM and space requirements)
P.S. Does anyone have a good recommendation on a tool that will be able to sync offline files with our company file server?