Development Tools, Environment etc.

I was able to find Mac versions of Aptana, VMWare (Fusion), Eclipse and pretty much all other tools needed for web development. I liked Synaptic on Ubuntu and how easy it was to install any development packages, latex libraries, tools etc. I am somehow reluctant to install Fink and so far I was able to install all required tools and packages without any problems. I had to install pyodbc, pyodbc-django from the package. But it was pretty straight forward.

Support

This paragraph doesn’t fit in but I just had my  first experience with Apple support and would like to comment on it. Some of the multi-touch gestures stopped working and after exhausting all my options I decided to exercise 90-day free support and called Apple. Better to say I let them to call me. I signed in, was unable to register laptop because Future Shop purchase date did not match Apple records. I just provided my phone number and they called me right away. I was on hold for 4-5 minutes and then friendly customer representative introduced herself. Which was really nice. It would be even nicer if they called when rep is available and avoid initial 4-5 minute wait time.

However, Rochelle was very friendly and said we will take care of that after we resolve the problem. Asked me to make keyboard gymnastics (pressing four different keys and power button on top of that at the same time) and problem was fixed. It was followed by some not that clear explanation about powering on some devices, but hey … it worked. Then she completed registration for me. Overall, very good experience. One point for Apple.