OSX vs XP
It has now been 5 days since I picked up my MacBook pro from work and I must say that I’ve become a hopeless Mac addict. I didn’t think it would ever happen as I’ve always been skeptical about Mac OS but as of today its over. I’m leaving the PC world behind and never going back. What was the clincher? Remote file system support. Eh? Whats that?
Well the Mac has this beautiful ability to connect to any server imaginable with the simple pressing of Command-K (Apple-K). What makes this beautiful is not that it can merely connect, Windows can do the same thing, but it can mount the remote server to your local workstation so that it behaves like a local folder. The beneift of being able to locally and natively mount a remote server is that if you have software (like Eclipse) that remotely syncs your project to the server then no matter where you are it will work.
A great example of this is when I’m at the office we use Samba on the Linux servers to push files around. But remotely we use DAV or FTP. Now with Mac OS no matter where I go it works. This was something that Linux had in not quite so elegant a package but something Windows was sorely missing.
So far I have tried DAV, Secure DAV, FTP and SMB (Windows file sharing). The only thing that doesn’t work is connecting over SSH. But oh well, it supports the most important protocols, and that is why I can now never go back to Windows.
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