Sold!

So now, a short two months later, I can safely say I'm done evaluating the Mac and now working on migrating to it completely. My MacBook has become my day-to-day personal machine and I really only use my existing Windows workstations at home to surf when I happen to be right in front of the machine.

I've been doing a test run with different types of data and applications to find the best way (for me) to use the Mac and to decide if there's any type of conversion I need to go through as I migrate my data. I ripped a handful of new music CDs and imported about 400 photos so I could play around with some multimedia content. I made a nice iPhoto book of my recent vacation in Vermont (way cool!), which has been a big hit with the grandparents. I checked out my subversion repository to try programming on the Mac, and outside of a few browser rendering quirks between IE and Safari, everything worked fine.

I had been using Microsoft Money for a long time to track my personal finances but was not really thrilled with the app (and the underwhelming annual upgrades). I did a lot of reading and reviewing of other products and finally settled on Moneydance. Migrating from my Money files wasn't that difficult - lots of people had done the same thing and posted notes to the discussion group - but I also wanted to clean up my data along the way and simplify my categorizations so there was a fair amount of work in getting it set up.

There was also one Windows-specific app that I'd become quite used to: KeePass. Its an application for managing the many passwords we all accumulate these days. It is an open-source application, but was developed for Windows so I wasn't quite sure how I was going to migrate the password database, plus I use it at both home and work so I wanted to find something that would work on OS X and Windows (so Keychain was out). It turns out I wasn't the only one with this problem as there is now a project for a Linux/OS X port of the application called KeePassX. Although its lacking some of the cooler features of the Windows version (like auto-type), it supports the same database format and that's what was important to me.

Backups

I've always been pretty good about backing up my data regularly and over the years had settled on scheduled tasks on all my machines that use Robocopy to mirror my data to my server, and then to mirror the server to a USB hard drive. I pretty quickly learned that rsync was the analogous technique for a *nix-based OS. A little googling led me to rsyncbackup which uses a Perl script to manage a set of sources, destinations and backupsets and invoke rsync to simplify the backup process. I configured it for a USB thumb drive, my home NAS and my externally-hosted Linux server.

Now that I have a feel for how I want to backup my data, I'll probably just write a Python script to drive the process. While rsyncbackup is pretty nice its a little more complicated than necessary (about half of the script is dedicated to parsing the config files, which I would just hard wire in as Python dicts). And its written in Perl: been there, done that, won't repeat.

With the recent demonstration of Tiger (OS X 10.5) at the WWDC, I'm very curious to play around with Time Machine. I think that will augment my backup strategy, but not replace it. I think Time Machine will mostly eliminate the need to recover an accidentally deleted file from an external backup, but you'll still want to backup your current data regularly to some external devices - even time machines break once in a while.

Open Data Formats

As I've put more and more effort into building, organizing and cleaning my personal data library (music, photos, etc.), I've become more and more concerned about choosing an approach that gives me control over my data. Mark Pilgrim has written about this and for him the solution was to move away from the Mac. While I understand his line of reasoning, I'm not driven as much by the principles between open and proprietary file formats, but more by the pragmatism of being able to do what I want. (Or maybe I'm just one OS behind Mark?)

So I did a little research into Moneydance, iTunes and iPhoto (the most relevant applications for me right now, with respect to data ownership issues) and have found ways to preserve my data and meta data in ways that allow me to: 1) restore the information if data is lost or corrupted, and 2) export the data to other applications if I ever feel like I've outgrown any of the applications. Of course, this isn't as easy as it could be (i.e. simple import/export features built into each application). I'll have to resort to a little coding to make it work, but I'm fine with that.

Diving In

I'm now planning out how to migrate my other PCs to Macs. The only complication is that my wife is pretty set on Windows so I don't think I can cut her over (not without lots of tech support calls to my office). I'm going to first replace my other two desktop PCs at home with a 17" iMac and either another 20" iMac or a Mac Pro. To support my wife's need for Windows, I've worked out how to setup her Mac login such that it will automatically run Parallels in full screen when she logs in. To her it will look just like a Windows machine, but over time she'll have the opportunity to get more familiar with OS X without being forced to switch overnight.

The last bit of the puzzle is to get a Mac mini and use it as a home theater PC for viewing photos, listening to music and watching videos. It works pretty well out of the box with the Mac remote and Front Row, but there are other HTPC apps out there that are worth researching. There are also some cabling issues that I need to look into, but I've learned enough to know that it will work nicely. And it will look cool. (Why are all the Windows-based HTPCs big, slow and expensive?)

So after dipping my toes in the Apple Kool-aid water, I'm ready to dive right in...

Tags: mac, osx, windows