I've been coding at home.. with my iMac.. only, using Windows XP 8)

While learning new OSes and new development environments or even new languages (Objective-C !) can be a great thing, my current focus is really mouse about graphics that application interfaces or multi-platform development.
I'm also so much used to Visual Studio (.NET 2005, using VC6 key mapping) and Visual Assist X.

I'm only now managing to get a decent setup and here is a list of things that are helping me:

VMWare Fusion

Fusion can actually display single application windows mixed with the OS X windows, but personally I prefer to leave it in a single window, better if full-screen.. because I can get OS X windows on top of it (basically full-screen means "maximized", though there is no "maximize" in OS X).

One problem I had, is that the cursor stays the Mac one, meaning that I get a black caret on my black background code editor windows 8)
For that I went to change cursor type on the Windows side.

Another key factor is having 3GB of RAM..

A Real Mouse !!

With one button one has to use the Control key to simulate right click. Which is fine, until you try to do Control+LMB 8)

Only today I discovered that Apple's Mighty Mouse (standard for iMac) can actually handle a right click !! Great ! ..not really: it's very easy to accidentally do a right click while trying to do a left one. A very frustrating experience, possibly worse than the unwanted side buttons clicks, the scroll ball/nipple getting stuck and sometimes the inability to click at all. What a crappy mouse !

My solution was to plug a regular 2 buttons + Scroll Wheel mouse.. much better now.

Key and mouse mappings

I set the middle mouse button (clicking on Scroll Wheel) to show "All Windows" (see Expose' video). The "All Windows" view is actually very useful.

Then I swapped Control and Alt (Option on Mac), because on the iMac keyboard Alt takes the place of Control which is too much an important key to try attempt relearn it's position (when I'm not at work !)

...And ?

My smallish "computer desk" is still lacking. Must get rid of it, but trashing old furniture and housing large furniture does require a certain will power if you live in Tokyo 8)

I wish I had two smaller monitors rather than a large 24 inches one. In the office, I like how I can maximize Visual Studio in the left monitor while doing something else in the right monitor.

Still, I'm much happier now. I can use the same computer using applications from both OS X and Windows.
Interoperability is great. Copy and paste, drag and drop works both ways.
Keyboard and mouse are just too important, and while I can tolerate XP not recognizing the Japanese layout (could overwrite a DLL for that, but I prefer the English keyboard layout for code anyway), I definitely needed to remap the Control key and to get a decent mouse.

I'm writing this with an editor on the Mac while the Windows screen saver runs in the background. Putting an x86 processor on the Mac is the best thing Apple could have done for the machine at least for those of us that can't get into serious relationships (with operative systems 8)

woooo !!