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I’m a mac girl

Mac girlOh yes, I’ve got a MacBook Pro and am immensely proud of it as well. As a new mac user I was (and still am) noticing constant ‘attention to detail’ bits that make using a computer ‘fun’ again. Ok, so that sounds really cheese but it’s true! Little things like when it’s too dark the keyboard lights up (ok, I might have got a wee bit over excitable at that one than I should have) or how nice most installations are comparatively to Windows. The initial drawback is having to experience the humbling effect it has when you can’t figure out what should be the simplest tasks, the ones that you laugh at your mom for when she gets completely lost, I am now my mom (to mom: sorry for the reference).

So after the first 2 hours playing with Photo Booth I finally was ready to put the intriguing effects away and get some programs on so I could actually use it for development. I had / decided to go in search of a few different programs than normal to suit the mac environment.

Adium - An excellent IM client for MacFirstly, of course, was an instant messaging system. I ended up installing Adium and seems to be working out just fine so far. It has most of the features you’d expect in a typical IM client and it also allows for multiple email addresses to be bundled and controlled at once.

I also really needed a remote desktop client to access our Windows servers at work and found and would highly recommend one named CoRD. So far I’ve found this program to be excellent, allows for connections to be saved and easily connected to, multiple connections at once and generally well provide a well organised system for managing remote access to our Windows servers.

I do quite a bit of .net development so it led to a bit of a problem in that you can’t get a version of visual studio for Mac (yet). A solution I’ve found and I’m sure many of you are familiar with already is Parallels - An excellent VM allowing you to use Windows programs on your MacParallels. A virtual machine that allows me to set up Windows and run the programs which I otherwise couldn’t have running off the Mac. I’ve read though a lot of the documentation and can’t seem to find if you are supposed to download all of the windows updates and install anti-virus as if it was a completely separate machine so if someone has some advice on this it would be much appreciated. At any rate I have decided to take the safest route for now and get all the updates and install Clamwin on the VM, a free anti-virus for Windows.

I still have to sort a few other programs that I’m going to need but I’m rolling along nicely now
Does anyone know of a good Mac program that works well with Exchange? Mail just isn’t cutting it and prefers to spaz out then keep a constant and accurate connection with my new emails…I blame exchange (I love my Mac, it can do no wrong)