I resisted the notion of buying a Mac for a long time. I own a business software company. All of our products are built on Microsoft technology. My migration away from Unix-based systems to Windows happened back in the mid-90s when I began to actively seek employment with a company that had business applications (specfically software development business apps) that ran on Windows NT. I didn’t realize that one day, more than 15-years later I would come full cycle and embrace Unix-based operating systems once again. What surprised me is that the transition happened at home.

On nights and weekends I began to dive into what was happening in the open source community. I am an investor in Eldarion, one of the leading Django development companies anywhere and developer of the open source Pinax framework. I used Pinax and Django on our DzineBox website. I maintained this site on an old IBM Thinkpad running Ubuntu. Since DzineBox is written in Django, Ubuntu (or any variant of Linux for that matter) made for an ideal development platform. But it wasn’t until I decided to start focusing on mobile app development that my need for MacOS grew to the point that I finally had to shell out the $1,200 for an iMac.

Now look at me. I am definitely late to the party but with my iMac, iPad and iPhone, I’m like an Apple commercial. I am using the Trackpad with my iMac and really like it so far. Not sure if it’s more effecient than a mouse yet, but it is really intuitive. So far I wouldn’t say that owning a Mac is transforamtional. Some people talk about these Zen like experiences they have when they get their first Mac. However I had the original Macintosh and many of the fundamental concepts are still in place. Furthermore, since I already use the iPad and iPhone, the UI was seemlessly for me. I know some people who only have experience with Windows platforms really struggle with the Mac.

I was using Appcelerator on my Windows XP machine in an attempt to start working with the Android SDK. It took some effort just to get it to work. But after it crashed my machine when I uploaded an update to the Android SDK I said enough. I will give Appcelerator a good college try on the iMac, but if it also proves flaky I am off to XCode and my dreams of building cross platform apps will be dashed (at least for the time being).