Kyle Wilson wrote a very good GDC 2007 trip report. (The kind I would have liked to have written, had I attended this year):

http://gamearchitect.net/Articles/GDC2007.html

Well, now that I've spent a couple of months coming up to speed in the non-Windows world, here are some of my impressions:

• Firefox with addons is tolerable for web browsing. I use these addons:
  • AdBlockPlus - superb ad removal tool. If everyone used it the web economy would collapse due to no more advertising revenue, but it sure makes web surfing nicer.
  • myFirefox - a theme that makes Firefox almost look and feel like IE7.
  • The Google toolbar - helps make searching better with auto-suggest, shared bookmarks, click-on search terms.
• XCode and Eclipse are tolerable alternatives to Visual Studio + VisualAssist
  • They are pretty clunky, buggy, and feature poor, but they're better than Emacs + gdb.
• Java is a tolerable alternative to C#.
  
• GMail is actually pretty good, especially at dealing with threaded conversations.
  • I wish you could automatically sort searches by sender -- it would make dealing with checkin mailing lists much faster.
• Google Notebook is a good replacement for OneNote for me.
• Google docs are a good replacement for Office for me. But I hardly write any docs any more.
  

I have Parallels, which allows me to use Windows XP on my Mac. So far the main use I have for XP is to run "Paint .NET" when I need to create icons. There doesn't seem to be a good free paint program on Mac/Linux -- I assume the Mac paint program world is a wasteland due to the ubiquity of Photoshop.

Some things I like about Macs:

• They really are simpler to administer.
• The whole UI experience seems "quieter". Many fewer dialogs popping up.
  
• My MacBook Pro goes into sleep and comes out of sleep pretty reliably. I get about one crash a month. That's better than any Windows laptop I've used.
• Darwin Ports (an app-get utility) makes it relatively easy to install new software packages.
  

Some things I don't like about Macs:

• The wireless networking UI is clunky and error-prone. It has 30 second delays built into it, without any user feedback.
  
• The anti-aliased font rendering sucks compared to Windows. It's too fuzzy, especially on small-sized fixed-width fonts.
• Putting the application menu bar on the top of the screen is a dumb idea in today's world of giant screens.
  • Similarly, click-to-receive focus rather than click-thru is a poor UI choice once you are running multiple apps.
    
• One button mice and track pads are hard to use. The two-finger partial work-around for trackpads helps a little.
  
• The dock takes up too much space. And you can sort-of hide it, but you can't turn it off.
• Only being able to resize a window from the bottom right is a pain.
• The Mac distinguishes between multiple windows in one app and multiple apps. The Alt-Tab feature only switches between apps. You have to use Alt-back-quote to cycle within one App. This is dumb in the age of web-based apps because, to the user, each separate browser window is a separate App.
  

All in all I still haven't adjusted completely, especially in the IDE area. Unix users seem to revel in hard-to-use IDEs. But I am gradually getting used to the new world order. For example I no longer have trouble using "Command" rather than "Control" to copy-and-paste text or close windows.

I finally got a chance to try out the Nintendo Wii. (No, really! Many Xbox team members own Wiis, but they never brought them into the office. As opposed to PS3s, which were brought in immediately. I think this is because the PS3 is more direct competition to the Xbox 360, and also because people were playing their Wiis much more than their PS3s.)

I played about an hour of Wii Sports with my kids and nephews. The bowling game was very accurate. I had the same problems in Wii-land that I do in real life, namely putting too much spin on the ball, so that it curved to the right.

The relatively low-quality Wii graphics are good enough for "symbolicly rendered" games like Wii Sports, even on a large screen TV. If I had a Wii and played a lot of Wii Sports, then I would want a large screen TV, just so my real-world field-of-view matched the game graphics. I bet Wii motivates quite a few HDTV purchase for this reason. It is unfortunate that so many Wii owners will be watching the Wii stretched horizontally, due to playing 4:3 aspect ratio games on 16:9 screens.

The Mii avatar system is a killer feature. The other consoles should copy it.

The sound-in-the-controller feature is not very useful, as the speaker is too quiet to hear during normal play.

I bet next-gen Wiis will have LED sensors on both ends of the controller, to allow 360 degree position sensing, rather than the 180 degree position sensing in the current system.

And finally, I'm not sure I'm going to get a Wii for my family -- my kids loved it, but they kept accidentally whacking each other and the furniture with the Wiimotes when they got excited while playing the games. Maybe when they're older.