With no outright offers to trade for a new machine, I am learning to love my Mac all over again. This is a more mature love, one without unrealistic expectations or unreasonable demands (like moving the Fn and CNTL keys).
I am taking a 10 hour per day course this week on WCF and WF. I saw this as an opportunity to force myself to use my Mac to write code and to play with some features I knew were there but didn’t grok. So, I am spending my time sitting next to Sir Macalot, Matt Berther, so that he can tell me things like, "you need to remap that key," or "download this killer thingy bobber."
It is working. I am falling in love all over again. This time with Parallels and OSX running my Windows environments instead of Boot Camp. Frankly, Boot Camp has never worked 100% with the driver issues I encountered and the funkiness of the Mac CMD key. I forked over my $80 and bought Parallels and removed my Boot Camp partition of Windows.
I am a much happier camper and the experience of dedicating an OSX Spaces space to my Vista VM is just awesome. AWESOME! It’s really like having several computers in the same box, finally. Lots of VM and switch ports pretend to offer this capability, but this is the first time I have ever actually been able to get that feeling of complete and total integration of more than one machine under my keyboard.
Bottom line, Parallels rocks. Hard.
I then have another space dedicated to my remote control of a VM in our cloud. Connectivity provided by Remote Desktop Connection for Intel Mac (Mac software from Microsoft). This is just pure butter. The performance of the VM is stellar and I can actually code in there with little to no lag.
So, here I sit, writing this post in my Vista VM, while making sweet, sweet love to my Mac Book Pro. Did I mention that the keyboard is still bugging me?
Ok. This post freaks me out a little bit. Some things a MS Windows guy are just not supposed to fall in love with :-)..
That being said I have been using parallels on My MAC mini for years. Very cool. I also like the way my mini integrates into the whole Windows net and AD at home.
I wish sometimes the Linix distros were this easy…
You should break down and just use an external keyboard for when you plan on doing anything for more than 30 minuets, that is what i end up doing.
Maybe you need to check out http://www.viemu.com. I’ve seen a couple of blog posts (http://codebetter.com/blogs/jean-paul_boodhoo/archive/tags/Tools/default.aspx) and screencasts (http://blog.eleutian.com/CategoryView,category,screencast.aspx) on using vim in Visual Studio.
This one is about someone’s frustration editing on a laptop before switching to vim: http://blog.ngedit.com/2005/06/03/the-vi-input-model/.
ViEmu costs about $80 (free to try), but may be worth it to solve your keyboard woes.
David, Ben from Parallels here…great story and I’m glad that you like our stuff. Would love to talk with you about sharing yoru story on our site…email me whenever you get a chance! [email protected]
i have been trying to use vmware for the past couple months… key word trying. i switched to parallels last week and it has been heaven sent. wish i would have known about parallels a long time ago
would have to agree with the above statement “Parallels rocks. Hard.”
Great Stuff