Mark Poppen

I’m not the guy that likes to experiment with an OS too much, especially if my work depends on it. It’s a reason why I chose Mac. Hassle free and easy to use. Apple released Mac OS X Snow Leopard a while ago, but I wasn’t too keen on jumping right into upgrading, especially because I read some reviews on upgrades going bad.

After the first update came out, I was more confident in upgrading, so I bought the software from the Apple Canada store and got it delivered within a week (which is fast for rural living). Since I had quite a few projects lined up, the DVD stayed in the box for about a week, but tonight I did it. I upgraded to Snow Leopard, and Apple reassured me again, why I made the right choice to switch to Mac. A painless upgrade without having to answer tonnes of questions or formatting hard drives. Just pop the DVD in, hit install, accept the license agreement and wait.

Ok, it didn’t go flawless. After about half an hour of installation, OSX spit out the DVD, rebooted and it was right back to where I started: 10.5.8. After reading the installation guide (RTFM *hum*) I found out you should unhook all external drives. I had my Time machine backup drive left on, which interfered with the installation.

Without that glitch, the installation took about an hour, including the first update. So I’m running 10.6.1 right now, and so far, everything seems to run faster, but that might very well be wishful thinking and a mind-game.

A few things happened since my last post about workspaces, so I thought I’d update you a little on the situation

When I got my Mac, I had to re-arrange my desk. I made my Windows pc into a media center, so I didn’t really need the keyboard on my desk anymore, which cleared an area for my Mac and tablet next to each other. I ditched the phonebooks as a monitor stand for something which is supposed to be made for holding a monitor, but I’m missing my phonebooks, so they might come back.

Here’s what it looks like now. Please post a link in the comments to your workspace/desktop. A link to this post is appreciated of course

Christmas day was a very good one for me. Not just because I had an awesome time with family, had good food, and some refreshing drinks, but also because Santa brought me an awesome gift (Ok, my wife did, but I didn’t want to burst your bubble). Here’s my new baby:

Santa brought me a Macbook!

Now, thrilled and excited, (because I’m one of the cool kids now, according to @mayhemstudios)I want to get working on it right away. I already got Photoshop, but I didn’t want to invest in Dreamweaver (right away), since I know there’s some killer apps out there for a Mac, I just want you to tell me which one is the awesomest. I heard Coda is pretty good, so I downloaded the trial for it.

Any other killer-apps are welcome too, but please don’t post links to “The top 100 Mac-apps” or something, ’cause that doesn’t tell me anything.