Playing with PCs is no fun

I work on a Mac. Lots. Recently I have had to do some rails work on a PC… and going back to WindowsXP is NO fun at all…

You might use windows, and if you do and you love it, good for you.

Me… I am a mac person.

I have been working on a PC for the last 2 weeks on a rails app that is in a place where Windows is used. And it dives me nuts.

Textmate isn’t available, getting E working was a pain in the butt… and now some of my old fav rubygems won’t install (Hpricot to name one).

It’s not that Windows is all bad, it isn’t.

But it IS windows on top of DOS and DOS and UNIX tools really, don’t mix, at all.

If you are a developer of web applications, and you aren’t on a Mac, you don’t know what you are missing, really.

I am currently lobbying to get a MacPro. Expensive bit of Kit, but then I will run the windows tools inside of Parallels and then I can have my cake and eat it to. I will be able to edit my files in Textmate, and run the SQLServer queries from a Windows “window”. Won’t really have performance issues as the “low end” Mac Pro comes with 4 CPU cores, so basically I can just give windows a core and move on. Plus with about 5Gb of RAM I won’t run into problems there.

Then I would be in developer heaven.

Because I will be able to drop down into unix and do XYZ without everything breaking, because I will be able to use my favorite textmate bundle, because I won’t have to delete the 200mb of the One Click Ruby installer because it conflicts with the cygwin version installed that E needs to run… because I won’t have to worry about virii… etc.

Anyway… end of rant and back to my windows box.

Mikel