MacBook Air and Unity for Game Development
It took me almost two years to justify the MacBook purchase. I bought a MacBook Air. It is an older model, but it was new from Best Buy. It was $899 for a 13″ 256GB HD and 8GB RAM. Not the bottom of the barrel, but a little under powered as development machines go. I had to break down and buy it because my Windows laptop really started to go. The screen flickers on and off and the keyboard usually responds when I press a key. It has not been portable for over a year and I have not been able to concentrate on real development for some time because of it.
The unboxing process for the MacBook Air was easy. I have a iPadMini, but am new to Mac OS, so there was some googling involved. Installing software consisted of going to the app store as well as company sites directly.
App Store:
- OneDrive
- xcode
Direct Sites:
- Microsoft Office (I have a subscription to Office 365).
- Google Chrome
- Android Studio for Mac
- gimp
- handbreak
- skype
- steam (why not – let us call this research)
- amazon music
Wanted, but Not Supported on Mac
- paint.net
I would document what I did, but everything installed with just hitting Next->Next.
Switching to Unity
After playing around a bit more with Android Studio, I have decided to switch to Unity. The cross-platform features and idea of learning a new language intrigue me. It may feel like one step forward, and two steps back, but I am making forward progress, even it it is at a snails pace.
In future posts I will start show how to to link the Unity Projects with my gitlab server from the git command line on the MacBook Air. I will get in the details as to why I did not use a git UI, but that is for another time.