Sean Johnson - Intentionally - The Education of Sean Johnson

So it’s been about six months since I made the switch to a Mac. It’s amazing to think about how much better my work life has been because of it. As someone who designed, coded, etc. on PCs for years, I used to bristle hearing that kind of hyperbole. How could a machine possibly make your life that much better?

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…

But it really does. Apple spent considerable time thinking about how people actually work. From the way the trackpad works to the ease of switching between apps…you actually enjoy the process of working on the machine. Just off the top of my head, I can point to several considerable advantages.

• The fact that it can be opened and closed in a second without having to completely reboot - I move from place to place fairly often and it’s awesome to be able to pick right up where I left off.
• The ability to open PSD files in Preview (or even directly in Mail) without having to load up Photoshop every time.
• Installing/detecting printers - the NY office has 5 printers on the network. Before it would’ve taken our IT guy 20 minutes sitting in front of my machine to get me up and running. The Mac just finds them on its own, looks for the necessary software and it’s done.
• The dock - I thought it looked silly at first, but it really makes a difference for me. I’ve always hated having a cluttered desktop - having the dock gives me all my common programs instantly available without a ton of icons on my desktop as an ever-present distraction.
• The trackpad - the two finger scrolling, etc. makes navigating around pages so easy.
• App crashes are few and far between, and there’s no bulky spyware software to slow things down.
• Finder makes it ridiculously easy to find whatever I need.
• The keyboard shortcuts - I can control Expose, Finder, etc. super fast, without having to use the trackpad or open anything up.
• The Terminal gives you all kinds of power to get under the hood, in a language most developers are at least somewhat familiar with.
• The love and attention on getting the user experience right was wore off on app developers as well. There is so much free or inexpensive software that is a joy to use, and that play really nicely with the OS (and often each other.)

Love is all around

People find it funny to see someone become such a convert so fast, but it really is such a wonderful machine. But it’s not just the Mac itself that’s made a difference, but the amazing software that is available as well. For anyone who’s a web developer or designer, having a Mac is such an improvement it’s hard to put into words. It’s amazing, but half of the work I do these days is on software I’d never heard of months ago. The ease of use, the gentle learning curve and the feature sets make learning and adopting new software painless.

For both people interested, my current setup includes the following:

• Entourage (I was using Mail.app until last week, when we got set up with an Exchange server at work. Oh well…)
• Photoshop (and lots of paper) for mockup work
• Powerpoint for the frequent presentations (I learned my lesson the hard way after designing three presentations in Keynote only to have to port them over so others could use them.
• Transmit for FTP - haven’t made the switch yet to Coda. For some reason, the integration of all the tools doesn’t seem like that much of an improvement to me. Keep in mind I’m generally wrong.
• Textmate for coding - can’t even begin to express how much I love this.
• Twitterific for keeping tabs on people’s updates
• Journler for writing meeting notes, drafting blog posts, etc.
• Skitch for giving people feedback on mockups or sharing ideas
• Fluid to run stand-alone versions of GMail and Basecamp
• Snapz Pro - this program is one of two that have done the most for me. I use it to record user testing to improve our interfaces, and recently started using it to make screencasts of anything I need to show people. It literally takes less time for me to record a screencast on how to use Wordpress or our Admin at work and send it to someone than it does to call them and explain it over the phone. An absolute life-saver.
• OmniFocus - I would try to explain to you how much I love this application, but you wouldn’t believe me. Let’s just say that if you’ve ever read Getting Things Done, this application will make implementing your trusted system ridiculously easy. I literally have everything I need to do personally or professionally, next week or 6 months from now, in this program. David Allen is right - you have no idea how much less stress you feel when your mind knows where to go to find your list of to-dos and action items.

There are plenty of others that people swear by, like Coda, Adium, Growl, etc. I still don’t get why Quicksilver is the greatest thing in the world, but people love it. But even with the small set of tools I use above, my working days have been transformed.

Needless to say, I’d recommend a Mac to anyone who will listen. It really, truly is that much of a difference.