When I last left off, I could access the Internet and the company network simultaneously. I could also access our NT Servers as if they were AppleShare machines and share my files with Windows machines. There are still lots of other things that I need to do to get my Mac to work smoothly in an NT world.

The next hurdle is Microsoft Office. I really try to not buy Microsoft products, so my first choice was to buy MacLinksPlus ($100) to convert between Word 95 and AppleWorks. The problem with this is that the conversion is horribly. Let me rephrase that, it's pretty good if you want to read Word docs with pretty much the same formatting and spacing and such (minus graphics). It's bad if you want to create documents, convert them to Word 95 and then distribute those documents.

I tried Word Perfect (which is really old so not a surprise that it didn't work), Nisus Writer (they try hard but their translators depend on Claris XTend, which is quite limited), and entertained using Star Office (which would mean somehow running Linux or Solaris). Eventually I gave in and bought Microsoft Office 98. It's big, slow, not entirely stable, expensive, but it works. Now I have no problems with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents and can create them if need be, using our company templates to create relatively professional-looking documents. Anyway, this set me back $300.

As I've mentioned before (somewhere), I use Code Warrior Pro for my development work. Writing Java can be done on any platform, heck all you need is a text editor. Code Warrior is about $450 for two releases including the one you buy. Funny thing is that a subscription renewal (covers 1 release) is $300, so chances are I'll just buy another full version instead.

For source control we just recently converted to CVS, which is a Unix-originated source control system. Our CVS server runs on Redhat Linux 6.0 and I use MacCVS Pro for my client. There are two other Mac CVS clients, some more full-featured, but MacCVS Pro looks the nicest and it's good enough for now. That's also free.

We also recently moved from our own proprietary mail system to IMAP and our custom developed calendaring and work group solution. I was using Eudora Light for e-mail, but it doesn't support IMAP. It was easy enough to upgrade to Eudora Pro ($40) to use our e-mail system. The calendaring stuff is web based so I can just use Netscape Communicator.

Now on to some smaller things. Instead of Vicomsoft FTP, I use NetFinder ($35), which has a great interface, although it's still FTP. Better Telnet ($0) for a Telnet client. MI/X ($0) for use as an X server (Unix people call their X clients servers and vice versa). Timbuktu ($150) to access my old NT workstation (for running Java). I wrote my own Java based SQL client for accessing our development databases.

And that's pretty much it. After $1600 I can my Mac almost exclusively at work without touching Windows, and that doesn't count the $2500 I spent on the PowerBook I use at work. I still can't run our products on my machine, so I can't do Forms programming or other more common jobs. But I have enough work now with Java development and I can leave the other stuff to my teammates. And I'm much happier.