In migrating to the Mac OS I plan on jumping in head first and hopefully the water is deep enough.

My goal is to run all native Mac OS applications where ever possible.

I have quite a large list of application currently running on my XP system that I must now find replacements for and I will be documenting each one. Below are a couple of major applications I am targeting first.

Microsoft Office Replacement

I have decided to not purchase the recently release Microsoft office for Mac and either go with iWork or openoffice.org. The reason is simple, I am tried of the Microsoft code bloat and slow applications. Microsoft Outlook has to be the all time worst offenders of Microsoft's own best practices when it comes to UI - don't do any time consuming processing in the UI thread. When I sync my email Outlook is all but totally locked up.

Java Development

This is the one area where I am really not worried and somewhat excited. I plan to use Eclipse, which I already use on Windows, and I expect all of the other Java tooling to fall right in line.

Microsoft Windows Mobile Development

Unfortunately here is where I really don't have much of an option. I will still be using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 but running inside a VM.

VM Decision

Because I am familiar and already use their products I have selected VMware Fusion for my VM. Although I am going to be running a VM I will to try and enforce a strict policy on myself where I will only run Visual Studio in the VM and no other major software package - everything else will be a native OS X application.

I have decided against the dual-boot option simply because all of my other applications will be running in native OS X such as email and I will need access to them while developing.