The Return of the Mac
For the last 5 years or so we’ve had a Windows machine in the office for two things: Browser Compatibility and Quickbooks. Today, we’re about to retire our poor neglected Windows machine ship it off to wherever PCs go to die. (Or maybe we’ll load FreeBSD on it and use it as an internal test machine. Either way.)
Ever since Apple switched over to Intel processors and Parallels came out with their excellent virtual computer app, I haven’t used a PC for browser compatibility. Why should I? I can have IE6 in one window and IE7 in another, both loading files from a shared directory on my machine. I can literally have 6 or 7 different browser rendering engines pointing at the same file at the same time. Make an update, hit reload, make another update, check it all around, done.
Quickbooks was another story. We’d been using Quickbooks Pro for Windows until this week, when I decided that enough was enough. RDCing into the server to run Quickbooks is a pain in the butt, and having to mount the shared drive with the PDF invoices on it (and mucking with Acrobat since Windows can’t produce PDFs natively like MacOS X can) is just more work than it’s worth.
The Mac version of Quickbooks Pro is Universal, it reads and writes Windows compatible backup files (handy when we send our CPA our file at the end of the year), and actually integrates into Address Book, Entourage, Excel, and all the other programs I use. Granted, it’s not perfect. The registration process gave me an error, but how could it be worse than using an entirely different machine?
Color me happy. Pretty soon we’ll be moving to electronic bill pay, I’ll have online payroll management, and instead of drowning in paperwork I’ll be able to do what I really love, make awesome web applications.
Hooray for progress.