My 30 day impression

I've been a loyal soldier of PC's ever since I was 10 years old, but 30 days ago I sold my Dell Mini 9 on eBay and picked up a Macbook Air from the Apple Store.

It definitely has a wow factor: It's thin, light, and looks very slick.

The first week I wasn't too sure if I liked the new system. The Copy/Paste commands were different, it used "Command+C" instead of "CTRL+C", so I end up using my thumb instead of my pinky to Copy data. There are no "Home" or "End" buttons which I use extensively in coding, and the single USB port was troubling.

I picked up a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse (which I have to admit, I don't really use), as well as a Time Capsule to backup all my data from work. The Time Capsule is interesting, because at first I thought it was just a wireless external hard-drive... but in fact, it also duplicates as a wireless router! The fact that I, of all people, did not know that tidbit of information is concerning -- Apple needs to make that fact better known!

Lucky for me, the Mac Heist was happening at the same time I purchased the Air, so I ended up getting nearly $1000 worth of software for a mere $40. The Mac Heist is a yearly event which features a series of puzzles and clues to follow around the web. As you help solve the "Heist", you earn more software and additional discount credits for the main bundle. In addition, 25% of all the money raised goes to Charity, so it's actually for a very good cause.

One of the standouts of this year's Heist was the game World of Goo. It's essentially a physics puzzle game which is quite addicting! The gameplay and graphics are top notch, and the music -- well, let's just say I downloaded the entire soundtrack (it was that good). World of Goo is also available for Windows and Linux.

Thankfully, all the other major work related applications I used had a Mac version (Zend Studio, Navicat), so that was never an issue. Now I'm starting to get the hang of the very powerful "Command" key, I picked up a USB splitter, and the back-lit keyboard is something I've always wanted on my PC.

Then, last week I got the news: Tweetie for Mac was being released in a few days. Tweetie is a Twitter client that started on the iPhone. It made great headway's in app development -- it never crashed, had a clean interface, and was feature rich without being laggy. The Mac version lived up to my expectations. I LOVE TWEETIE!

I mean, just check out the feature list!

• There's a global hotkey to tweet from any application. In fact, I think I'll use that hotkey to let everyone know about this new blog post!
• You can view trending topics on twitter in any number of separate windows to keep track of what's hot.
• It supports multiple accounts, which is something the main twitter website needs to get moving on...
• And the ads that get placed in the twitter stream are actually quite interesting. They are mostly ads for iPhone or Mac applications which are usually quite useful! It almost makes me want to keep the free ad-supported version.

All-in-all, I'm very impressed with both the hardware and the software on this Macbook Air. The finger gestures on the trackpad are useful, being able to control iTunes via built-in FN keys (without any additional software running in the background) is wonderful, and I picked up the most amazing leather "envelope" case!

Maybe my next desktop will be a Mac too... we'll see Steve Jobs!