A Fresh Cup

There are always about a million little fiddly bits to do to get an application out the door, aren’t there?

• Backing Up Your Mac – Recently-revised article from MacZealots listing some easy alternatives. Doesn’t answer all of my questions but it’s a good starting point.
• mirRoR Placement – A pure Rails job shop. It’s another sign of the rapid growth of the Rails ecosystem that we’re seeing firms like this pop up.
• Announcing Multisite Plugin for Rails – Serve multiple domains from a single Rails application by giving each a distinct set of views.

As I switch more of my computing life over to the Mac (it’s now home to most of my e-mail accounts, my calendar, my task list, and some of my Web work, as well as the bulk of the Rails development I’m doing), I find myself accumulating bits and pieces of software. It’s dangerous to draw any conclusion based on the small exposure to Macs that I have so far, but it seems to me that most of the Mac apps I’ve looked at are more visually polished and have more internal coherence (i.e, they do one thing and do it well) than most Windows apps that I’m familiar with, but they also tend to have less inherent functionality. On the whole I’m very satisfied with the Mac experience (especially on days like today, when my main Windows development box blue-screened five times).

Stereotypes and sweeping statements aside, it might interest some other Windows refugees to have a list of some of what I’ve found it reasonable to install so far:

• Adium (free) is a reasonable enough multi-network IM client. It’s still a bit lacking in functionality compared to “Trillian”http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/ on Windows though.
• Chamonix (free) is a CHM file viewer. Not as pretty as Chmox but more functional.
• CSSEdit ($29.95) is a real find; this CSS Editor is way more functional than anything I’ve worked with on the Windows side.
• EasyTask Manager ($19.99) is my choice for task lists at the moment. They oversell the GTD-ness of the application, but they have one key feature I can’t live without: recurring tasks.
• Firefox (free) remains my browser of choice. I can’t imagine doing without its wealth of extensions in favor of anyone’s native browser.
• Growl (free) is somehow far less annoying, perhaps because it’s more consistently a standard, than any of the “toast” notification options on Windows.
• Navicat ($99) is doing for a MySQL GUI client for now. It’s got a ways to go, but it’s better than doing everything with the command line tools.
• NeoOffice (free) is so far handling my light word processing and spreadsheet requirements on the Mac. I’ll probably have to revisit this as I move more office work over, but I have no intention of letting a Microsoft product on to this box.
• OmniOutliner Pro ($29.95 upgrade price) is taking care of my unstructured text and list needs. This is a category I’ve always kept some application or other busy in, so it was good to see lots of choices here on the Mac. This one clicked for me better than Yojimbo or Tinderbox though they’re both intriguing as well.
• Pukka ($5) is a del.icio.us client. That’s not a category of software I thought I needed, but it’s very well done and useful.
• QuickSilver (free) has actually gotten me using a keyboard-driven program launcher, something none of the Windows entrants in the field ever done. I’d like to see it pick up some of the Web-driving goodness of DQSB on Windows (I know, I could program a lot of that in myself but I’m lazy).
• Shrook (free) will probably be my RSS reader when I move my feeds over. Everyone raves about the look of Newsfire but trying to read 400 feeds in that UI would drive me mad. NetNewsWire probably has the right functionality but I’m not going to subject myself to Newsgator’s software registration system.
• TextMate (€39) is just as fabulous a prrogrammer’s text editor as everyone says it is. It’s obvious why people are trying to clone this for the PC.
• Twitterific (free) does absolutely nothing for my productivity but it’s fun to watch all these random people wander by on my screen.

At the start of the year I switched my e-mail client from Outlook to Thunderbird on the PC. Yesterday I made another transition – I’m now using Apple’s standard Mail app on the Mac to read my mail. I considered using Thunderbird on the Mac, but while it’s a reasonably serviceable client, Thunderbird just doesn’t have the fit-and-finish or feature level of either of the native applications.

I looked at using Emailchemy to bring my existing archive over from Thunderbird, but it didn’t do a good job converting the Thunderbird 2.0 beta files (after importing the files into Mail, it claimed all the messages were on the server, which was very odd considering that the mailboxes were POP, not IMAP). Ultimately I decided that it didn’t matter, as I’ll have access to the archive on the PC for the foreseeable future.

Overall, my first impression is that Mail is way ahead of Thunderbird as far as polish and functionality go, but somewhat behind Outlook in functionality. On the other hand, it’s not as much of a bloated pig as Outlook either, and after using it I’ll probably discover some things it can do that Outlook can’t. Adding in MailTags takes care of several big missing chunks of functionality, and Growl notifications are nice as well. So for the moment I’m happy.

Dan Benjamin has an updated article on how to do it – Building Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X . This will give you all the necessary bits from source, which is how I prefer to work, so I recommend it to you as well. A detailed recipe that can save you much pain.

• SQLGrinder is another DBA tool, this one using JDBC for connectivity. $59 to register. My initial attempts at using it to connect to a MySQL database on a different machine weren’t successful, but then, so far everything I’ve tried to connect to a MySQL database on a different machine have been unsuccessful.

• BuildFactory is a continuous integration tool that runs on the Mac, integrated with Subversion and various editors. $35 to register. I don’t need this yet, but might come in handy in the future.

James Higgs has been on the PC-to-Mac trail longer than I have. His Mac OS X applications I use post has plenty of links that I’ll be checking out (though, thankfully, I think I’ll be able to avoid putting MS Office on my Mac).

Learn Cocoa is a baby steps tutorial to building a simple Cocoa app (well, really, just sticking some components together, but it introduces the toolset). I’ll probably work through it, though at the moment I don’t have any particular ideas about Mac desktop apps that I’d want to build.

Well, the new Mac is here and happily chugging along. I haven’t started coding on it yet, though I have installed a batch of software. A few initial thoughts:

• It sure is purty, in an industrial design sort of way. But I suspect it could have been $50 cheaper if the case wasn’t so overdesigned, and the keyboard and mouse frankly suck as far as I’m concerned (your ergonomic preferences may vary of course). I’m almost certainly going to pitch the Mighty Mouse in favor of a decent trackball. Unfortunately Unicomp doesn’t make a Mac keyboard, so I don’t know what I’m going to do in that department.
• OS X is reasonably easy to transition to, but I was surprised at the lack of any obvious “start here” introduction for new users. People who say it’s intuitive are full of poop (just like the people who say the same thing about Windows).
• Some things, like getting hooked up to the Internet via my wireless access point, did indeed just work. But they just work in Windows these days too.
• James Duncan Davidson’s Guide for Installing Rails on Mac worked perfectly after I tracked down one broken link.

Much more to come, I’m sure.

Daddy, someone took a bite out of your new computer.

- Thomas Gunderloy

Looks like I’ll be needing these links in a day or two:

• Right Way to Install Rails on Mac OS X?
• Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger
• Sandboxing Rails With MacPorts

Like a lot of other geeks, I paid some attention to the keynote at MacWorld yesterday. Though nothing announced there really interested me (oh, the iPhone looks like a fairly sexy bit of engineering, though it’s a perplexingly stupid decision to not let users install their own software on it, but I don’t carry a cel phone), I hopped over to the Apple store yesterday afternoon anyhow. That’s because I was just waiting to see if there was any changes in the Mac Pro lineup before ordering one.

So, a couple weeks from now I should have a Mac sitting on (well, under) my desk along with the Windows and Linux boxes. I also splurged a bit and treated myself to a new Dell 24” monitor. I figure I’m going to cover about half the cost of this system by not renewing my MSDN subscription this year. Now it’s time to get serious about spending a couple hours each day working on new skills.

Hack Attack: A guide for switching to a Mac

VMware Fusion looks like a great way to preserve existing investments while I slowly migrate.