If you know me well, you would think it outlandish for me to speak of a Mac as a tool of my own, personal trade.  However, that is only because I spend so much time talking about the software tools I use most often, which happen to center around the world of Microsoft's Windows platform.

A few years ago I purchased my first Mac product.  In fact, I purchased it for my wife as I thought she would enjoy using a stylish notebook for her daily computing needs.  Fast-forward to now, and me better understanding her computing needs ("just something that works, every time, without the need to relearn everything"), I now use her 2008 Macbook as my road warrior machine.  It's obviously an older Macbook, but I did swap out the RAM and HDD for beefier specs which make it sing.  It does what I need it to do: write software quickly and reliably.

Here's the catch-- up until now, I've always ran virtual machines of Windows installations within Mac OS X to do my daily job, or Bootcamp.  However, this week I am going to try something new.  I recently needed to reinstall everything on my old Macbook and I figured it was time to finally cut my teeth on developing software, full time, from within native Mac OS X applications.

So, I've installed Eclipse, FileZilla and I'm going to give RazorSQL a try, as an alternative to Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio for Windows.

I'll report back here in a future blog on how I make out.  I know many a professional developer has gone the path of Mac before me.  I just hope the path is as worn as others in the blogosphere would have me believe!

Wish me luck. ;)

Posted by: Ryan Covert at 11:22 PM