Saturday, May 24, 2008

Heron, Gentil Heron

This is a follow-up for my last rant about how an unhappy Java developer I was on Leopard. I just had my first week of work with Hardy Heron running on my MacBook Pro and I am so glad I went through the few hours of setup and configuration: this bird really flies!

Gone are the feeling of clunkiness and resistance Leopard was giving me: things flow so easily in Ubuntu that I actually forget about the OS. Of course, I turned off all the fancy schmancy visual effects and activated just what is needed to jump between applications and desktops with a few key strokes.

I can now enjoy standard Java JDKs, too! It is a pretty good feeling to be back to year 2008.

In the migration, I have lost Entourage, which is in fact probably a blessing. I now use Thunderbird IMAP-connected to Exchange and have a Firefox tab opened to the Outlook Web Access 2007 (pre-web 2.0) interface to access my calendar.

The only application I will sure miss is the excellent Omnigraffle Pro. Any decent alternative on Linux?

So after this trial, I decided, Gentle heron, that I will not pull the feathers off your head.