I'm responding to Jeremy's message here 'coz it seems relevant...
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jeremy North Sent: Friday, 5 June 2009 9:44 p.m. To: NZ Borland Developers Group - Offtopic List Subject: Re: [DUG-Offtopic] I reckon I need a new dev machine and... Why a mac as the base machine? What are the reasons (curious because this is something I am considering as well) - but will wait until after the conference to see if any updates are annouced. I did get a Mac, and am glad I did. It has taken a while to get everything set up, but now the Mac is the machine I use for regular work. D2009 runs nicely in a VMWare Fusion VM with Windows 7 as its OS. D7, D2006 and StarTeam run in another VM using XP. Using VMWare Fusion's Unity mode, along with the Mac's "Spaces" virtual desktops, I now have a very tidy work environment with not too much on any screen at any one time, and everything just a keystroke or 2 away. The hardware I ended up with is a MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo chip, 4GB RAM and 320GB disk. Oh, and a 24" LED cinema display. On paper, the computing power that this thing offers is not really very much better than my old Sony Vaio (which was about the same money 2 years ago), but the usability is incomparable. All of the source code lives in a folder which the OSX host shares with both virtual machines, so all flavours of Delphi (and StarTeam) can get to it easily. I toyed with the idea of using Remote Desktop for Mac (a free download from MicroSoft) so that I could use the corporate installation of Office, but ended up buying and installing a native Mac version of Office instead. I'm still using a remote desktop connection for corporate email, since the fancy Exchange integration with Mac mail is only a promise from Apple for Snow Leopard due in September. With this setup, and with D7 and D2009 both running in their VMs, I get icons for each copy of Delphi in the dock, and can switch to either (which also activates the correct virtual desktop) with a single mouse click. So why Mac? It is simply a nicer place to work than Windows is. Everything is easier. Finder is nicer than Windows Explorer. The only thing that has been holding me back until now is the need to run my beloved Delphi IDE. Now (thanks to virtualization), Delphi just works on my Mac. In fact, Delphi in a VM hosted on my Mac notebook is more responsive than Delphi in a native OS on my corporate supplied Windows machine with similar specs. I don't feel a need to try to convert anyone, nor to sell the Mac experience. I don't care if you prefer Windows, and call people like me Mac FanBoys. My only intention in writing any of this is to say that if you would like to try what is available on "The Other Side", it will still work well with Delphi. Although (to be honest, and with recent comments about cross platform Delphi vs 64 bit) I would love to see a native Mac hosted Delphi IDE as an option even if the target OS was Windows (for now). If you like to try stuff - don't be scared. Mac + Delphi works well. Trevor
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