If all goes according to plan, I should be picking up my new Macbook Pro tomorrow afternoon from Apple specialists extraordinnaire Ynzal Marketing. This switch to Mac has been a REALLY long time coming for me, considering that it is pretty much the most perfect machine I could possibly get as a web developer. (MacOS is the only operating system that supports both developer-friendly Unix shells AND designer-standard Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator without having to dual-boot or install a whole mess of libraries. And any system that comes with my editor-of-choice, emacs, installed standard deserves some serious kudos in my book.)
I’m only vaguely familiar with MacOS and all of its various inner workings so I’m going to be taking the day off tomorrow to study up and start figuring out how it’ll integrate into my workflow.
The big concern in my head right now is how to leverage my other laptop, the HP TC1100, for maximum benefit. Basically, I need some way to develop our websites on the Macbook, then view the results on the TabletPC, so that I can quickly test on Windows IE, Windows Firefox, Windows Opera and Mac Safari. (I suppose you could say that the ideal setup would be to have 3 monitors hooked up in a line, but that’s ridiculously extravagant. It’d be pretty cool though.)
Precisely how to do this is something I haven’t figured out yet though, because my work environments are kinda … non-standard, I guess you could say. I have 3 primary ones at the moment:
- My condo unit (where I spend 20% of my working hours each week), which has one Ethernet cable going into my DSL modem, but no Wi-Fi router.
- My office (60% of my working hours), where the office-wide Wi-Fi network allows me to get online fairly easily.
- Various coffee shops with Airborne Access (20% of my working hours).
The question is, how do I move between the three places with both the TabletPC and the Macbook, and maintain their exclusive peer-to-peer relationship over Wi-Fi? Off hand it doesn’t look like there’s a way I can easily do that AND have a working internet connection, since a peer-based, ad hoc wireless network would supersede the global one that serves as the Internet gateway. (Apologies if I’m mangling the terminology here … networking is unfortunately not my strong suit.)
The only way I can think of is to have the Macbook physically plugged into the bigger, Internet-providing network via a LAN cable, then share that Internet connection (as well as documents and data) with the TabletPC via Wi-Fi. That’ll work for both the condo and the office, but it looks like I’ll be out of luck whenever I work at coffee shops (i.e., one of my laptops won’t have an internet connection or a way to share data).
Apart from that little hitch, everything should be smooth sailing though. I’ve been doing a lot of switching-from-Windows-type research so I should be armed with enough knowledge beforehand that I won’t just be lumbering about blindly.
Whew. Can’t wait till tomorrow :)