How did it come to this?  I still can’t believe it myself.  I started as an Intel + MS-DOS guy (was I the only one that was thrilled when DOS 6.22 was released??).  My first deviation from the Intel / Microsoft platform was Solaris, strictly via the shell.  I refused to deal with the Solaris windowing environment.  No fancy frills for me, just give me the CLI and leave me alone. Windows came along and it opened a whole new way of working with computers for me.  Then came Cyrix & AMD and I haven’t owned in Intel processor since.  Finally, Linux hit the world by storm, and I found my new favorite platform (Linux on a PC).

The one constant in all of this change? No Mac…never, ever, ever. I refused. I didn’t like their products, didn’t like their messaging, and couldn’t stand their image. I always said: “Macs are for art students and kindergarteners, PCs are for doing real work”.  Yet despite all the goodness I heard regarding OS/X, I refused to believe Macs were finally running a real OS. Plus, every time I walk by an Apple store and see the “genius bar,” I can’t stop laughing.

As the Product Owner at AccuRev, the problem I began hearing more and more from customers I really respect was they love developing software on their Macs, but their AccuRev/Mac experience could use some improvement.  Given that AccuRev is a leading provider and integrator of Agile Software Development Tools, I put my Agile Product Owner hat on and visited some of our Mac users to see if we needed to do some agile planning and shape up the backlog a bit to support the Mac better.

All I can say is I was definitely blown away watching the Mac experience in action. These brilliant engineers were showing me areas where both the AccuRev GUI and our AccuBridge for Eclipse and IntelliJ integrations can be improved upon as part of the natural Mac UI.   In my next agile planning session, I prioritized Snow Leopard support right to the top of the backlog. (Which by the way is so great about agile; being able to adjust or course correct your plans after each sprint is powerful, thus allowing you to react to your customers so much better.)

I had to make a tough decision: either take our customers’ word for it, or experience it myself. I figured what better way to see what needed fixing than to have a Mac affect my daily use. So I took the plunge and bought a MacBook.

Testing Agile Planning on the Mac

So I am sitting here as I type this with 2 Chrome windows open (23 tabs total), Firefox open (11 tabs), Safari open (5 tabs), Eclipse, AccuRev, 5 bash terminals running, simultaneously running Windows 7 and Ubuntu VMs (via VirtualBox), 3 Word docs and 4 Excel spreadsheets open, and 6 Finder windows. The MacBook is basically laughing at me as if to say “keep it coming”…  I am still in disbelief.

Here is AccuRev’s WebUI running inside of Eclipse on Mac with AccuRev’s Eclipse integration enabled. I can do all my agile planning, process management and development right from within Eclipse!

So that’s it…I’m a Mac fan now. Don’t expect me to be growing a ponytail anytime soon though.