In this post, I explain what happened to me 4 years ago, that changed my life, from business activities to daily web surfing and mail checking.

I am an author, trainer, and programmer, mainly focused on Microsoft technologies. I have written many books on different areas, from .NET technologies to SQL Server and Microsoft Office. I have also taught many programming courses, such as Visual Basic, Visual C++, C# and .NET Framework. Also I have designed and taught a complete course on the fundamentals of .NET Framework programming using the C# programming language. All the activities regarding this course, from teaching to graphics design and audio and video editing were done by me.

When Apple first released iPad in 2010, I decided to buy an iPad, as it was the best device for reading books, regardless of it’s many exciting features and the potential to be used in many areas of work.

When I arrived home and unboxed the iPad, my six-year-old daughter took it from me and started to play with it. She didn’t even ask me a question about how to work with it. This was a good reason of how intuitive the iPad was.

After a few days working with the new device, I decided to make applications for it. So, I had to buy a Mac, and it was one step further toward the Apple world. After some research about different models, I bought a 21.5” iMac, with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It was my first experience with the Mac world, and compared to Windows 7, it was more advanced and more beautiful.

From the very beginning, I had a different feeling and experience with Mac compared to Windows. It was so much intuitive and easier to work with. I realized that Mac had a different philosophy than Windows. Many people new to Mac, try to get the things done the same way they have done it on the Windows. That’s totally wrong. To use a Mac efficiently, you have to forget everything you know from the Windows world. You have to think differently.

I found Mac a lot more stable than Windows. Previously, I used to install a fresh copy of Windows on my PC, at least once every 6 months. Something that is unlikely to happen for Mac OS X. Needless to say that when I worked with Windows, I had to frequently restart it, as it slowed down. But I never had to do this with Mac; there had been times when I didn’t restart Mac for 3 or 4 weeks and may be more, and it worked seamlessly.

I don’t want to talk too technical here, but these two operating systems are fundamentally different. Mac OS X is based on Unix, but Windows is a standalone OS.

Most of my data files belonged to Windows; for example, my programming projects were done in Visual Studio, or the books I had written were all in MS Word. There were also many VBA code written to extend and customize Microsoft Word. So, at the beginning, I had to have a Windows installation on my new iMac. After testing Bootcamp against using virtual machine, I chose the latter, so I could switch between Mac and Windows without restarting.

As time went by, I got more familiar with Mac OS X features. Also from the very beginning, I started to learn to program for Mac OS X and iPhone OS. My strong background in C/C++ and Object-Oriented Programming, made it very easy for me to learn the fundamentals, and the Objective-C programming language.

One of the great things that I used in the learning process, was the iPhone OS programming course from the Stanford University on iTunes U.

I found that the main IDE on Mac is called Xcode.. For someone like me coming from Windows with Visual Studio experience, it seemed a little weird at first. I got used to it in a very short time. Now it’s my preferred tool for coding and debugging. I know a lot of keyboard shortcuts and work very fast with it.

iTunes, another application, which I only used it to synch my iPad before buying the iMac, became my preferred Music and Movie Player. I had worked with many music and movie players on Windows, but iTunes on Mac OS X is the best in my opinion. Today, I have a huge iTunes library of Music, TV Shows, Movies, iTunes U and Podcasts, with extremely easy and excellent search ability.

Any time that I want to listen to music, all I have to do is to type all or part of its name in the Spotlight Search. No need to say that you can use Spotlight Search to find and buy music from iTunes Store as well.

And the same applies to movies, iTunes U courses, apps, and Podcasts.

I don’t want to waste your time and talk about the details that caused me to move completely to the Apple world, so that I remove the virtual machine and don’t use Windows at all. Just consider the following:

Today:

I don’t have to check my emails. Emails and messages are pushed to me through Notification Center, no matter which device I am working with.

When I am browsing the web using Safari on my iMac and my daughter want’s to watch a movie on the iMac, I can pick up my iPad or my MacBook Pro and continue my work from where I left off.

My contacts are stored in the cloud, which is accessible by any of my devices. The same is true for my Calendar, Reminders, Notes, and any iWork (Numbers, Pages, Keynotes) documents.

My daughter sits at iMac and browse iTunes Store for games, and download it to the iTunes library, syncs her iPad and that’s it. She starts to play. Searching for new apps and buying is also possible using the iPad or iPhone. It’s great. I compare this to the time when I was a child!

I am never worried about pressing Ctrl + S every minute to save the document I am working on, as I used to when working with Windows. Thanks to Auto Save feature of Mac OS X Lion (and newer). If I want to save a version of my current document, I press Command + S. In fact, there is a version control system integrated in the OS X.

There is not a lot of cables around my computer. You know that cleaning a desk full of cables is very hard. Thanks to Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad and Wireless keyboard, my desk is always clean. The only cable is the one that connects the computer to the power supply.

When I want to watch a movie on my iPhone, I don’t have to watch it on the small iPhone display. I simply transfer it to my Apple TV through AirPlay Display and watch it on my 47” TV. I can also use my TV when I FaceTime with my brother, watching Youtube, or playing a movie with iTunes on my MacBook Pro or iMac. I can even browse all the shared iTunes Libraries using the Apple TV.

Creating a home or office network with Apple computers is so much easier and it is often more reliable than Windows PCs.

Thanks to the Time Machine technology and a nice Time Capsule, I am no longer worried about losing any data. All my data is always backed up automatically. I can travel back through the time and view all my hard disk space using the Time Machine UI. Time Machine keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups until the backup drive is full.

The most important thing that I have to mention is the consistency between the software and hardware provided by Apple. The softwares are specially designed for the hardware they are shipped with. You may hear about the long battery life of Apple devices. I have a MacBook Pro, and based on its specification, its battery life is up to 7 hours, while surfing the web with the screen brightness at the middle. I have used it on battery for up to 12 hours, while coding and debugging in Xcode, listening to music and with WiFi turned off.

My brother lives in Melbourne, Australia. Believe it or not, we don’t even feel that we are far away from each other. Using the FaceTime and iMessage, we are always in touch. Although these kind of services are available to other platforms, when compared to other similar services, the ones provided by Apple are so much better and more user friendly. When I send a message or an email to my brother, no matter where he is with which device in hand, the message or email is pushed to him and he get notified. We never use regular phone calls.

3 years of non-stop encouragement to my brother, caused him to finally switch from Windows world to Mac. Although he has been using iPhone, and had experienced Apple technology long before me, but he was always against me, and thought that Apple devices are so expensive. Now he doesn’t think so.

CONCLUSION:

Although I had used Windows for almost 2 decades and am certified by Microsoft as a solution developer, the intuitive, user-friendly, and beautiful UI together with robustness, reliability and simplicity of Mac OS X was one of the main reasons that I switched from Windows to Mac.

Getting familiar with Objective-C and Object-Oriented Design Patterns used in Cocoa and Cocoa Touch (The API layer of Mac OS X and iOS respectively), opened my sight and the way of object-oriented thinking.

Objective-C has some unique features which bring many abilities to the object-oriented design process. I found those features new and got interested in the new design patterns that I had never seen before.

Now all my computers and hand-held devices are from Apple. This does not mean that I have to leave all the previous learnings and experiences from Microsoft World. Instead, I keep them as a background and try to learn the new things and changed the way I thought.