Switching

After spending the vast majority of my life in front of Windows, that is all about to change.

Kinda.

I’ve decided that my next computer purchase is going to be the new high end MacBook. I had the privilege of borrowing my friend Chris Granger‘s MacBook and finally finished learning all of the shortcut keys. That was, amusingly, the last bastion. Give me some credit though, I’ve got years and years of Windows shortcut keys muscle memory to fight.

I’m personally excited about the new design especially in regards to the new trackpad (though the same can’t necessarily be said for Brian Dillard). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been frustrated while mousing around on a laptop that I had to either lift and tap to click or involve other fingers in the matter. Now I can go directly to where I wanted on the screen, and press down to click. I don’t have to gamble on whether my tap gets picked up or if I shift when moving the thumb I’m supporting my hand with. Of course, I’ve not touched it, but I find this to be a great idea… hopefully. I will agree with Brian on one point: the mighty mouse does suck.

So I’m switching to a Mac, but, as a web developer, I can’t actually completely discard Windows as a platform I use. There is a certain browser I have to test sites in that makes that impossible. But I think I’ve come up with a rather elegant solution for the situation I’ll be in.

First, I’ll set up my new Mac to my liking—that’ll probably take a while since I tend to like going through every possible setting to see what I want to set, but I’ll enjoy every minute of it. Once I’ve got that good to go I’ll install Windows XP SP3 as a Boot Camp partition on my laptop and use VMware Fusion installed on the Mac side of things and tell it to run that Boot Camp partition in a VM. (I like having options, can you tell?)

I’m looking forward to it.