So yes, I broke down and installed Win 7 on my MacBook Pro. I’m not happy about it, but considering what I need for AS3 development this seems to be the cheapest alternative.  Hard to believe, right?  Well, here’s the skinny.  On OSX I was looking for a program similar to Flash Develop, which is free and open source, but PC only.  I’ve started a project in it and really want to finish it based on that IDE.  As for mac, a copy of Adobe’s Flash Builder would run me about 600 dollars for a license.  Not really what I was willing to pay.   There were a few other alternatives like Haxe and FDT, but those were not working with my pre-existing code base (at least not easily) so I was left floundering.

Realizing that I could easily bootcamp, I just needed a copy of windows and I could get back to my previous setup.  Looking at current OEM prices, I found a cheap copy of Win 7 for under a hundred dollars online (it is also nice to have a friend at M$).  After the install and some wrestling with Bootcamp, I’m back to my old dev environment again.  Word to the wise, use your original factory Mac OSX cd’s that came with your mac to bootcamp.  DO NOT try and be a smarty pants like me, and download the latest bootcamp software as an alternative.  NOT a good idea.  You can always update the boot camp software through apple software update anyway, so find those system discs!!!  The process after that was smooth sailing.

My only problem so far has been the small crap that comes with putting windows on a mac.  Like the keyboard and mouse.   Still getting used to that as I do switch back and forth from time to time.  The most recent hurdle I had to overcome though was getting my display to look correct on my laptop screen, as everything is very blown out and hard to read.  What I didn’t realize was that in OSX and now Windows, you can share icc color profile’s back and forth!  Here’s the article I dug up.  Pretty snazzy.  Now if I could just remember to NOT press APPLE + C to copy things….sheesh…