To begin, for those who haven’t heard, I ended my 6.5 year career at Nintendo at the end of May. We parted on good enough terms, and over this first week of transition I’ve even exchanged a few emails to help with projects I left behind. Where did I go? Well, not too far at all, actually! I went from one of the oldest entertainment companies in Japan to one of the oldest entertainment companies in America; I’m now working for Disney, albeit as a contractor for now.
But this post isn’t about that. No, this post is about a lack of communication, a change in the status quo, and what it means to me personally.
It begins with the miscommunication, as these stories generally do; no one ever asked me when I started what sort of computer I wanted. I didn’t even think to mention it as every IT shop in the world runs Windows, right?
Well, that’s apparently where the change in status quo comes in. For the last year, nearly every employee my new manager has hired has wanted a Mac, and sixth months ago he decided he was sick of getting a PC, then needing to put in a request for hardware, then wait 2 weeks, and then have more down time while the employee sets up the new Mac. So, he just started defaulting to it.
And me? I never asked, so here I am, telling you about my first week… from a Macbook Pro. And let me tell you, I’m definitely seeing why folks want this setup.
And that is command line. Back when Mr. Jobs & Company changed from OS9 to OSX, dropping PowerPC, signing up Intel, and swapping the core of the OS over to a Unix-based platform, I was just graduating High School. In college and beyond, I never used a Mac again, but I did use Linux. And now I’m glad I did; there’s some real power in the CLI on OSX.
All that said, however, there is one thing I’m still getting used to. OSX makes it much harder (natively) to maximize windows, dock them to the sides of your screen, and do other “structured” operations with windows, which I thought was odd at first. As I’ve used it, however, I’ve realized that maybe I’M the one who’s been doing it wrong.
I’ve started letting windows take up their minimum space, and letting the screen naturally fill with tasks, ebbing and flowing as my day goes. The Parallels window breaks the flow a bit (as having a 1/8 screen VM isn’t all that useful), but otherwise it’s been enlightening.
So far, I haven’t found anything that’s dramatically harder or easier between the two platforms. Finding some software for OSX ( e.g., a specific version of the JDK from 1.6) has been challenging at times, but most of it is from the era before the change in the quo.
In all, I like the change for getting things done. However, it’ll be a while before I drop my native Windows OS machine due to hardware costs and software (game) support. Apple is getting close, though, and this experience has gone a long way in convincing me of that.