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Ha, I only know of it by rumor, since I'm a Mac boy, too.
I actually used one of the very first incarnations of the program back in 2008 or 2009. I have absolutely no clue how I got my hands on it, even Anki wasn't popular at the time. Anyway it was a pain to set up and I hate complicated things, soon after I switched to a Macbook pro and that was it. Still I have seen the recent versions of the programs and it looks way better and if you are into movies it would probably help you a lot. I'm just too lazy/have no time to set up parallels/bootcamp for anything like that.
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Sure, why not. Like I said, I'd recommend postponing character studies until a year or so into your studies, anyway. Skipping characters is totally fine, though you will have a hard time learning advanced vocabulary. But that should only be a problem if you're aiming for something like a C1 level, and by that time you'll have invested enough time and know the language well enough that such a decision would be much easier to make.
That said, using characters could give you a bit of a head start since you'll have a much easier time spotting Japanese and Korean loanwords. Cantonese has tons of Japanese loanwords, and Japanese and Korean both have tons of Chinese loanwords, so using characters could make it easier to connect the dots, so to speak. Once you know the Cantonese readings of most Japanese characters, you'll get loads of words for free. So it might actually be worthwhile to learn the Cantonese readings of the characters you already know from Japanese, I dunno.
So you're implying that written Cantonese actually uses traditional characters? Or it uses simplified but there's a degree of overlap with Japanese?