Category: Productivity

Personal Virtualisation on Mac OS as a Developer? Probably Not.

by tarambling, posted in .NET Development, Apple, C# Development, Cloud, Mac OS, Productivity, Software, Virtualisation

Much of my recent professional life has been dominated by the Microsoft development stack – Visual Studio, C#, SQL Server and related technologies, and in recent years, the popular JavaScript frameworks and libraries, Angular and React.

Developers who work with a similar technology stack, would often use a Windows machine as their primary development workstation, as I did. But, my preferred personal computing platform, has always been Mac OS and Mac hardware. So my employer’s or client’s workstations have almost always been powerful Intel-based Windows Workstations, but my personal machines have almost always been Macs.

When doing work at home on my Macs over the years, I’ve tried using various flavours of virtualisation on Mac OS, to run instances of Windows, on Mac hardware. I did this to run:

  • Windows-based Dev Tools, such as Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code, or
  • Windows-based Services, such as SQL Server, or Internet Information Services, both of which stretched the capabilities of a virtualised Windows environment extremely, or
  • Other software or services for which there wasn’t a non-Windows option.

Initially, I used VMWare Fusion extensively, and more recently, particularly since Apple Silicon, Parallels. Both Fusion and Parallels are excellent products, but in recent times I’ve begun to re-consider the value of virtualisation of Windows on Mac for development activities.

Continue reading “Personal Virtualisation on Mac OS as a Developer? Probably Not.” →
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A Trip Down Computing Memory – And How Far We’ve Come

by tarambling, posted in Hardware, History, mac OS / OSX, Productivity, Software, Technology, Windows

I was talking with a friend the other day, about the “prehistoric” days of computing, about things we did in our youth tinkering with PCs, which ignited our interest in computers. And apart from this proving a fascinating “walk down memory lane”, these reminiscences got me thinking about some of the features of modern Operating Systems we take for granted today.

My earliest experience was on an Apple IIe, with a Z80 card installed, which allowed me to run what seemed to me at the time, an incredibly powerful Operating System, CP/M. And the highlight of using CP/M was what I thought was a very sophisticated Word Processor, Wordstar.

For those not familiar with this now ancient program, here’s a fantastic video from Youtube, which provides a quick overview of the use of Wordstar. And although I can’t be certain, given the “naming” of the drive used, I suspect it is actually being launched (very slowly) from a “floppy disk” – and for those who don’t know what they are – yes they’re the things that look like the Save Button in modern programs, that no one uses any more!

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An Excellent Monitor, AND a great KVM Switch into the Bargain

by tarambling, posted in Hardware, mac OS / OSX, Productivity, Technology, Windows

Now that so many of us are working from home, new challenges arise in our study or home office. Many will be forced to use two computers – our own, and a computer provided by our employer, because it has a prescribed or controlled operating environment, or connectivity or tools installed. Unless you’ve got a really big desk, or actually like typing on laptop keyboards – does anyone? – it’s going to get very crowded if you need to have separate external keyboards and mice for both machines, so I’ve commonly used KVM (Keyboard / Video Mouse) switches in the past – of varying levels of sophistication.

Continue reading “An Excellent Monitor, AND a great KVM Switch into the Bargain” →