Microsoft Vs Mac

[football52]

Alright so I just recently got rid of my leveno laptop that I loved greatly but now I'm considering getting a Mac laptop. I have a few questions on Macs since the only apple product I've ever owned is an IPhone. I'm considering a Mac because well, making iPhone apps on a Mac would be a whole like easier than going through all the loop holes in Windows.

I'm Senior computer science major and all I've ever used for programming is Visual Studio, Netbeans and Ecplise on Windows. As far as a Mac goes, how desirable is it to have a Mac book for programmers? I had heard that Mac supports many languages but your .Net and visual studio stuff you would have to use a VM running windows 10 to use it.

Another thing is how does opening files and transferring between apple and windows work? For example, If I'm on my Mac and make a word document and save it on my USB, can I access that file on a windows computer on campus? Same thing goes for making a netbeans project in a windows machine, can I open it in a Mac that's running netbeans?

Basically what I'm asking are what are the limits of doing work in both environments?

 

[gussrtk]

I can't speak for much other than file formats. lets say .doc is a document in windows or mac, it's opened by supported program, be it MS-WORD or other. same like .jpeg it's still a picture, viewed on both system.

 

[USAFRet]

You do know that Visual Studio natively supports making Apple apps, right?
https/code.visualstudio.com/download
https/msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn771552.aspx

 

[nukemaster]

Sending projects from one to the other should not be much of an issue. You just require a file system that both can use(for external media that tends to be FAT32 or exFAT[for newer operating systems]). NTFS is limited on OSX and HFS will NOT work on Windows without 3rd party software(but can be done if you had to).

Things like digital cameras will still use FAT32 anyway.

Central storage should not to too bad. Network shares generally work on both. If you happen to have a NAS, most also have Apples own file sharing and SMB for Windows. With a little work, you should have no issues from a filesystem point of view.

Software is going to be more hit and miss. Not all software has a Mac or Windows port. You will have to look into this before making the plunge.

 

[football52]

Honestly didn't know visual studio did, disregard the whole making apple apps thing then, what would the pros and cons be

 

[jsmithepa]

Honestly didn't know visual studio did, disregard the whole making apple apps thing then, what would the pros and cons be

As long as you got the mula$$ for a VS Mac license.

I can say my own experience tells me if you want to cloud-sync your contacts, calendar, reminder etc Mac-iPhone it cannot be any smoother, have not experienced anything like that in the Windows world. Con: Once Apple locks you into their eco-system, hard to escape. ^).

 

[USAFRet]

Honestly didn't know visual studio did, disregard the whole making apple apps thing then, what would the pros and cons be

As long as you got the mula$$ for a VS Mac license.

Visual Studio Community
Free
https/www.visualstudio.com/downloads/

 

[Solandri]

Most of the developers using Macbooks are Unix gurus, since OS X is a shell running on top of a modified version of BSD Unix. If you're not into Unix, then I'd say there isn't much difference between the two as a dev platform. Regardless of which one you pick, you're probably going to be test-running your app in a virtual machine. Or even running the dev tools in a VM. VMWare Workstation seems to be the most robust on Windows, but VirtualBox is also popular. Parallels works best for OS X.

Be aware that Office for OS X tends to lag behind Office for Windows in features. And unless you're comfortable with a Unix command prompt, OS X hides a lot of options and settings you may take for granted in Windows. On the plus side, OS X does tend to be more stable, and being Unix is more suitable for real-time OS-like tasks than Windows. Stuff like audio sampling tends to work more smoothly. Windows wasn't built as a real-time OS, so if there's a burst of system activity while you're sampling, it can cause a dropout. That's possible too with Unix, but happens much less often.

Oh, if you share files from both OSes on a Samba shared drive, OS X will leave all sorts of extra files named things like .DS_Store. The OS X filesystem (HFS and HFS+) allows a lot more file attributes than NTFS or ext3, so when a Mac saves a file on a non-HFS drive, it uses that file to store that extra attribute info. In Unix, filenames beginning with . are hidden files. But Windows shows them by default, which can be a bit annoying.