I’m not trying to start a PC vs Mac debate, but rather get some opinions on which people prefer to use from a development point of view.
I’ve got machines running OS X and Windows, both with Dreamweaver & Photoshop (my main development tools).
Most of my development work is done in PHP, which I could easily perform on both Windows and OS X, but my issue comes when I need to develop .NET projects. It would require me to run windows within a VM and have Visual studio installed.
Looking at some OS stats available on the web, it seems on average that 90% of users are using Windows, while around 7% are using OS X. So depending on the project I’m working on at the time. 90% of visitors may be using Windows, so would that make Windows to obvious choice to develop websites on?
At the minute, I develop a site in Windows, do necessary testing in IE6,7 and 8. Safari and Firefox. Nine times out of a ten, a quick test on the Mac doesn’t show up any problems. Developing on a Mac would be different, testing initially in Safari/Firefox, then having to use windows in a VM to test on all the windows browsers.
So my question is, which do you develop on? What applications do you use? Do you develop .NET websites, and if so how do you get around the issues and do you find browser testing on OS X a pain?
Again, I don’t want to start a huge debate on Mac vs PC.
I don’t see any problems with developing on either platform (or some Linux installation, for that matter). It’s fairly easy to check the site on other platforms using services like Webshots, and if the site is coded to standards, it should not require extensive cross-platform testing, unless you’re using advanced Javascript.
I use Windows but in all honesty it doesn’t make a difference. If you do use Windows the major 5 browsers (IE, FF, C, S, O) all run natively on the platform, there’s emulators for various incarnations of IE (which can run natively) and therefore you get the live experience of testing on the platform a large majority of people will use. However if you do have a Mac you can use something like Parallels or VMWare Fusion to run Windows itself within the Mac (virtualized) therefore counterbalancing the argument as you can still test the same browsers. Personally if I was buying a new PC I would be tempted to buy a Mac and have Mac / Windows / Linux all installed (therefore optimizing the number of platforms I can test on), with conventional PC’s you can’t run Mac (which is the only downside).
I don’t code using ASP.NET (For websites) though I do some coding in VB.NET and C# (software applications), and for designing websites I tend to use Notepad++ with a whole suite of good utilities (some free, some commercial), I don’t use a major suite like Adobe CS or Microsoft Expression
As others have said, in terms of developing for the web it doesn’t matter which platform you use. If .Net is your main tool, I would probably advise you stick with a PC, though you can run Windows on a Mac. However, the best way to do that is to boot up in Windows… but then you have to reboot if you want to test on OSX, which is a pain.
Though I use VMWare on my Mac, I wouldn’t use it for things like .Net, because it ain’t the be-all-end-all. (To be honest, it’s pretty clunky. I only fire it up to do browser testing, and grudgingly at that.)
