Mac or PC for Web Development Business?

OspreyO · 17 May 2010 at 16:08

b0rn2sk8 said:
...No one seems to have mentioned downtime yet. If your mac goes down, you have to send it away, or wait for an appointment etc. If your PC goes down, you can get parts same day or next day easily. Any downtime could be detrimental to your business.

I don't get you. The parts are the same in the most part. How they are repaired is down to the service agreement you have, or the warranty.

MuGeN · 17 May 2010 at 16:18

noooooooo everyone saying he needs a windows box as well as the macbook - all you need is a copy of Parallels running Windows 7 and IETester

- no need for a whole separate machine to test IE! crazy talk!

reflux · 17 May 2010 at 16:40

bigredshark said:
Or a VM, or it'll run nicely in wine under Linux. I'm not sure about CS, I don't rate the GIMP as anywhere near photoshop personally, let alone CS5 and I like Dreamweaver as a tool and I think any serious developer is going to want a copy...then again it's a huge investment for a start up company in an already crowded market...

I'm sure every firm runs things differently, but it's certainly my experience that DreamWeaver is a bit of a 'jack of all trades, master of none' piece of software. Eclipse with a proper FTP program will do it all for free, with more advanced features. I'm with you on GIMP though - I've never managed to get my head around it at all but it's great that there is a free alternative out there.

MuGeN said:
noooooooo everyone saying he needs a windows box as well as the macbook - all you need is a copy of Parallels running Windows 7 and IETester - no need for a whole separate machine to test IE! crazy talk!

IETester isn't as good as it seems. We used it for a bit and we decided it wasn't accurate enough. I agree with you though, you don't strictly need a seperate Windows box, but you do need some way of natively running the various versions of IE somehow. IE6 ships as default in Windows XP mode on W7, and IE8 includes an IE7 mode so that helps a lot.

OspreyO · 17 May 2010 at 16:43

bigredshark said:
OK, lots of dumb people or people who work with dumb IT departments who think mandating a browser which doesn't understand web standards is 'a good idea' and haven't grasped that Firefox is as easy to deploy and manage today. I'm not normally an advocate of deviating from the easy way in a corporate environment but IE is a terrible, terrible bit of software.

So the "Joe" in sales who has nothing to do with IT is dumb, because of his companies IT policy. Mary in marketing who uses some intranet ActiveX to merge data from the intranet with her Office template is dumb because she uses IE aswell. IE is used for a lot more than just the Internet. Theres a vast amount of legacy intranet applications out there.

bigredshark said:
And for your information I had no problem with Microsoft distributing a free browser with their OS, I don't know where you got that idea from. That apple choose to distribute a standards compliant webkit based browser is excellent in my opinion as it's one less thing I need to install.

I dunno either because I never mentioned that.

reflux · 17 May 2010 at 16:46

Interesting article here re IE6:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/ne..._term=Main Account&utm_campaign=microblogging

Cuchulain · 17 May 2010 at 16:47

bigredshark said:
I'm not normally an advocate of deviating from the easy way in a corporate environment but IE is a terrible, terrible bit of software.

LOL at this! Apart from it's lack of CSS3 support, IE8 (and IE7) are not "terrible, terrible" browsers, were you exaggerating for effect or are you actually clueless on this particular subject?

bigredshark · 17 May 2010 at 16:57

Cuchulain said:
LOL at this! Apart from it's lack of CSS3 support, IE8 (and IE7) are not "terrible, terrible" browsers, were you exaggerating for effect or are you actually clueless on this particular subject?

It's slow, it doesn't support web standards, it's vulnerable to exploitation. What exactly is to like about it? It's a relic. If it was cheap and offered some advantage over the competition then it'd be understandable but the entire market segment is free and the competition is notably better.

Three/four years ago IE8 would have been a par product but today...

I'm a network architect for one of the largest internet groups around so I know just a little bit about the subject.

bigredshark · 17 May 2010 at 16:59

OspreyO said:
So the "Joe" in sales who has nothing to do with IT is dumb, because of his companies IT policy. Mary in marketing who uses some intranet ActiveX to merge data from the intranet with her Office template is dumb because she uses IE aswell. IE is used for a lot more than just the Internet. Theres a vast amount of legacy intranet applications out there.

or people who work with dumb IT departments

Did you miss that, I'm not call those particular people dumb, I'm calling their IT departments dumb and/or lazy.

Anyway, this isn't helping the OP.

MuGeN · 17 May 2010 at 17:10

I'm completely with anyone slagging off IE... all versions are a thorn in the side of web designers!

You write a fully standards compliant site which works a charm in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc and then have to have separate hacky methods to get the same thing working in IE8, 7, 6 (sometimes completely different problems with each version!)

Microsoft really need to draw a line in the sand and start fresh and stop trying have legacy support for archaic browsers!

QwaF · 17 May 2010 at 17:17

Ya know. Microsoft's Enterprise network software and services offer good integration with a windows network, and much better configuration ability for those networks which only use Internet explorer, therefore surprisingly - IE being the default browser on the network sometimes allows for better security.

A network of a thousand computers, that is priceless for network administrators - they get to easily configure the browsers of all those, in one go. Yeah, it is unfortunate that it is such a terrible browser, but in the end control and security is most important.

bigredshark · 17 May 2010 at 17:27

QwaF said:
Ya know. Microsoft's Enterprise network software and services offer good integration with a windows network, and much better configuration ability for those networks which only use Internet explorer, therefore surprisingly - IE being the default browser on the network sometimes allows for better security.

A network of a thousand computers, that is priceless for network administrators - they get to easily configure the browsers of all those, in one go. Yeah, it is unfortunate that it is such a terrible browser, but in the end control and security is most important.

Once upon a time that was true, these days Firefox has a set of group policy extensions to allow the same type of management as you get with IE, it's long been able to be deployed as an MSI as well.

So that argument died a while ago, indeed if security is a priority you could argue deploying a less exploitable browser might be desirable...

macfanuk · 17 May 2010 at 20:55

Thanks for all the helpful posts here. To answer a few points:

I actually use many different components of Adobe Creative Suite - I currently use InDesign (for brochures), Illustrator (for logos), Photoshop (for basic Image editing), Dreamweaver (for hand coding - better than Notepad), etc.

I think I'm going to find a couple of 2nd hand Macbook Pro's and make do with them

OspreyO · 17 May 2010 at 22:46

bigredshark said:
or people who work with dumb IT departments

Did you miss that, I'm not call those particular people dumb, I'm calling their IT departments dumb and/or lazy.

Anyway, this isn't helping the OP.

You never mentioned IT dept originally, beside which you've haven't excluded the users with the "or" either. Name calling doesn't add weight to any argument. The point is, IE is useful beyond the scope development for the internet.

Its important to know that if you do any development for business, intranet etc, you are likely to run into systems, that require IE, as they use MS components, ActiveX and integrate with Windows, or Office etc. Until something comes to replace the usefulness of that, IE will remain. That said I don't see the point of supporting legacy versions of IE. If you can run IE7 you can run IE8. If you can't run IE7 then your PC is beyond ancient.

reflux · 17 May 2010 at 23:45

macfanuk said:
I actually use many different components of Adobe Creative Suite - I currently use InDesign (for brochures), Illustrator (for logos), Photoshop (for basic Image editing), Dreamweaver (for hand coding - better than Notepad), etc.

Ah ha, right, that's me answered then, I'll shut up now

You might be able to find some cheap CS4 licenses now CS5 is out.

macfanuk · 18 May 2010 at 01:07

reflux said:
Ah ha, right, that's me answered then, I'll shut up now

You might be able to find some cheap CS4 licenses now CS5 is out.

apologies, didn't mean to make you feel like your advice wasn't valued (if I did, I'm sorry). Will definately look out for a cs4 license.