Blog: From Apple to PC to Apple - the full circle

Hi All,

First of all, a bit about my history with Function Point ...

I have been working as part of the Function Point team since 2002, right from FP V0.00001 pre Beta.

OK, that's it for the history lesson, back to now !

OK, enough with now, lets go to some real history ...

When I was 11 years old (just a few years ago), I got my first computer. It was a brand new Apple IIc with 128kb of Ram, a floppy disk, and a 7" monitor (green colors only).

My father told me that if I "just play with it" he will be very disappointed, so right from day one I bought booklets to learn BASIC (yes, that is a computer language), and that was when I fell in love with programming.

About a year later, I got an adapter for the Apple IIc that connected it to a real TV, and gee those 16 colors looked AMAZING, I thought that this is the where technology would end ... because who needs more than 16 colors with 128kb of RAM ???

A few years went by, the Apple IIc collected dust, and the new PC Clones replaced it ... the first one was an 8MHz with a "turbo" button to 16MHz (with a whole 20MB drive and windows 3.11), later a 32MHz, 128MHz, 512MHz, 1Ghz (win 95), 1.2Ghz , 1.8Ghz (Win 98), 2.6Ghz (Win 2000), 3.0Ghz (Win XP), 1.8Ghz dual core (Win VISTA) , IMAC 24", 2.96Ghz ...

Just a second !!! ... an IMAC ???? what's with all the PC's, and suddenly an IMAC ??

Well, I guess the latest and the greatest of Microsoft OS did not cut it for me ...

Let me tell you a bit about the transition ...

I have been using a PC since I was thirteen or so (just a few years ago), so it was not easy to switch. I started by buying a MAC, installing bootcamp on it with .... VISTA (yes) ... and Parallels running Windows XP Proffesional (just so I feel at home in both environments).

When I first started to use that setup, I kept logging in to the VISTA side, later I switched to spending more time in Parallels on MAC ... but slowly and surely I found myself using the Mac OS more and more (the VISTA Bootcamp partition is long gone) ..

The trick for me was to find replacements for all of the programs I used to on the Windows side ..

So here it goes, the golden list of programs I used on my PC, and switched to on the Mac:

1. Development PHP IDE --> Zend Studio (PC) --> Zend Studio (MAC)


2. Productivity --> Office 2007 (PC) --> Office 2008 (MAC)


3. Development / Subversion Client--> Tortoise SVN --> Syncro SVN


4. Email Client--> Thunderbird (PC)--> Mozilla


5. Browser --> Firefox / Safari (PC) --> Mozilla (again) / Apple


6. Maintanance --> Add / Remove Programs(PC) --> App Cleaner (Free)


7. Development / design --> Photoshop / Homesuite color picker --> Colorpicker Cannot find the link, email support team if you want it


8. Development / design --> Photoshop (PC) --> Photoshop Mac


9. Download Manager --> Free download manager --> Igetter


10. DVD / Disk Burn --> Nero --> Burn (Free)


11. Media Player --> VLC --> Flip4Mac Telestream / Apple (quicktime) / VLC


12. Reading Windows Help files --> Windows CHM reader --> Ichm (free)


13. Development SSH drive --> ExpanDrive --> Macfusion (Free)


14. Development SSH client --> SSH Secure shell --> Iterm (Free)


15. MySQL GUI Client --> EMS MySQL --> Navicat MySQL


16. Security --> Norton 360 (PC) --> Norton AntiVirus 11 (MAC)


17. File Split / Concat --> HJsplit --> Split & Concat (does not work on Snow Leopard yet ..)


18. Software KVM --> Synergy (PC) --> Synergy KM nice GUI for synergy (Free)


19. RAR Files extract --> Winrar --> UnRarX (Free)

It seems that one can find pretty much everything to use on a Mac.

Good Bye Windows, Hello MAC OS

Thank you for reading :-)

Alon Sabi

VP of technology