Well, I’ve finally got round to getting my hands on a Mac - a shiny 17″ MacBook Pro, no less - after last being heavily involved in Mac development about a decade ago when it was all about the somewhat basic IDE (at least in today’s terms) MPW - the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop. Check it out if you’re doing any retro Mac OS 7 coding, and aren’t scared of an environment without intellisense! It was a blessed relief when MetroWerks came along with CodeWarrior and bought Mac development out of the dark ages. Gutted; I’ve just discovered that they actually discontinued it in July 2005. Still, having just run up Xcode, I can safely say it’s living on in spirit.

More by luck than judgment I picked up the machine a couple of days after the launch of Leopard, so got that included, and it’s a good job because one of the killer features for me was bootcamp, and this comes as standard with the new OS. Don’t worry, I won’t be going into excruciating detail about the other new features - but mostly because I haven’t used previous versions of the OS enough to be able to make a worthwhile comparison.

Despite that, I still think that it’s a stark reminder of how good an OS can be; a solid foundation combined with a good consistent and cutting edge UI experience.

But I’m off to boot back into Windows for a quick bit of HL2 EP2…