More On The MacBook

Five weeks into the world of Apple.  My new MacBook Pro is the machine I'm using to compose this.  I must say, after six weeks of very hard use, I absolutely love this thing.  It is an awesome piece of hardware.  Fantastic implementation of an OS.  And VMware Fusion is a very solid implementation of virtualization.

If you are anything like me, the first thing you do on a new machine is start loading all your comfort apps, and customizing the way everything works.  A few weeks after I started using the MacBook, I realized that I had loaded VERY FEW additional applications.  

Here is a breakdown of the additional software I have loaded on the Mac.

• VMware Fusion
  
• Firefox
  
• Microsoft Office
  
• Skype
  
• Chicken Of The VNC (VNC Client http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc )
• Editra (text editor  http://editra.org )
  
• Scribus (desktop publishing http://www.scribus.net )
  

Allow me to explain a couple of these.

• I could not find a VNC client on the base OS, which actually surprised me.  As much as I dislike the name of "Chicken Of The VNC", the tool works flawlessly.
  
• I was surprised and somewhat perturbed that there was no good, colorizing text editor installed by default on MacOS.  I would have been happy with syntax-coloring vim.  After some searching, I decided to check out Editra, mostly because it is written in my favorite language: Python.  So far I am reasonably happy with it.
  
• I added Scribus mostly because I wanted to experiment with it.  Very cool stuff.
  

As a long-time unix user and administrator, I was very happy with many of the tools included with the OS.  One such example: I was thrilled when I opened a shell and typed svn and it was there!