I must admit it took me a bit by surprise.
Quick background summarizing my month+ of silence: My choice of product to develop has gone through a few discrete generations (I’m doing this. No, now I’m doing this! No! Now I’m going to do this!!!), and I seem to have settled on putting together a group of iPhone applications. Trendy, right? Well, whatever the case, I’ve moved on to spending multiple hours a day in OS X (my ‘windows’ work laptop is actually a MacBook Pro running bootcamp, so this is the first time I have truly benefited from having a mac as my work computer (as opposed to struggling with the deficiencies of bootcamp)), and much to my surprise… I love it.
I don’t think I’ve used OS X for anything more than web browsing and DVD-watching. Now I’m immersed in Xcode and Interface Builder. What I’m starting to notice is how much time and care was put into all of the minute details, from more intuitive (and consistent!) keyboard shortcuts (command+shift+z is undo, not command+y) to saving state of tree views. Little things, like going to rename a file and having the filename but not the ‘.extension’ highlighted. I know I know, Apple thinks through their UIs. That’s headline news right there. Well, consider me a couple of years (decades?) late to the party.
As it is right now, I’m actively trying to figure out some way to get off developing on Windows and moving entirely to the Mac. Biggest hurdle? Money. I guess I need my iPhone apps to blow up.
