Switching to Mac OS X

So far I have been quite a satisfied user of Windows XP, having to deal with the whole Windows platform as part of my day job anyways. Put as of late I found myself in a position where I was constantly hitting some edges I did not like about it. For some time I was able to get myself going by using more and more helpful Unix tools, which were ported natively to the Windows platform by some friendly folks.

But in the last couple of weeks I grew even more impatient especially about the visual look and responsiveness of the graphical user interface. My first reaction has been to get myself a copy of the new Windows Vista and evaluate if I would eventually be able to hold myself back and wait on the next Windows version that promised to get a new breath-taking look and feel. But after some days of extensive testing I had to finally realize that Windows Vista would merely be able to catch up with the graphical features of all the other OS'es available right now, but would by no means be able to show any innovation or even take the lead for some month. Considering that I would have to wait for the next Windows version after Vista probably for four years or more, it just wasn't an option.

After looking out for contenders I got myself copies of Ubuntu Linux and for some old habit a copy of OpenSuse and tried both KDE and Gnome again. While both gave me a lot of flexibility and have improved a lot since I last looked at them a couple of years ago I still wasn't satisfied. My main problem with them was that I would have to spent weeks to configure them in a way that I would find them usable and fun to work with. This showed me once more why I like Plone so much - sensible defaults and not too many options on the standard config screen, while still retaining the flexibility of being able to customize every part of it.

Now as I needed to get myself a notebook I did the one obvious thing after all. Being a core Plone developer I had seen the majority of friendly folks at conferences and sprints using some hard- and software of a certain fruit company. Now thanks to my current Google Summer of Code project I had the money to buy myself one of these fruit boxes myself :)

As a nice add-on bonus I got myself a notebook with a native English keyboard so I would not have to dislocate my fingers anymore while typing some code which included some of those rare characters like brackets, which are at insane positions at the standard German keyboard.

Thanks to some nice how-to from philiKON I was able to get those few umlauts I needed on occasion working with ease. For all those lazy folks out there you can get my keylayout file for U.S. (German) and a nice icon for it. I hope you like the icon Philipp ;)

Now I have to get back to coding as the CMF 2.1 integration bundle for Plone 3 still needs some love...