I feel a bit like a traitor to the open source movement: I just re-signed up as a Mac OS X and iOS developer

I am a Linux enthusiast (downloaded my first distro over a 2400 baud modem, a long time ago!) and I really like the Android platform.

That said, I have really been enjoying the integration between my iPad and my Apple iTV (that my stepson gave me for Christmas) and the Mountain Lion OS X information released today makes me feel fairly certain that the "Apple experience" is what I want when I am not earning money doing server side Java, AI and textmining consulting gigs, etc. For the work I do for making money (i.e., consulting) it doesn't matter what computer and operating system that I use. I am even planning on trading in my Droid cellphone for an iPhone this year.

I also have a long history with Apple. I prepaid for an Apple II and received serial number 71. I wrote the simple little chess program that Apple gave away on a cassette tape for a while. When the Mac shipped in 1984 I bought one right away and wrote a commercial app that generated a lot of revenue. So, Apple and I are old friends :-)

One of the reasons I paid Apple today to (re)join their developers program is that I want to play around with the early developers release of Mountain Lion. I would also like to experiment (play!) with the intersection of iOS and OS X rich clients for web services, etc.

Edit: I installed Mountain Lion. So far I like it and the only disappointment is that Air Play is not working (yet) to my iTV. As expected not all Apple apps are updated to use iCloud storage, etc.

Edit #2: AirPlay Mirroring doesn't work yet on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

Edit #3: after 1 week: I have spent a few hours working through Apple's iOS 5 and OS X Xcode tutorials - fun stuff, but I am going to spend less time on this in the near future because I am very busy with work projects.

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