Woo I'm getting a MacBook!

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Ollie Saunders
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Woo I'm getting a MacBook!

Post by Ollie Saunders »

Sure its £750 quid, and no, I can't afford it but I'M GETTING A MAC!

Can any mac owners out there recommend any cool software I should install for web development?
matthijs
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Post by matthijs »

Congrats!! You are not going to regret it :)

I've switched myself a few months ago - never looking back.

My list of software:
- Textmate (textedit, cheap). Easy to use but very powerfull.
- Transmit (ftp, cheap). Very slick.
- Fireworks (affordable). Personally like it better (for web) then photoshop and paint shop pro.
- Adium (chatting, free). You can include all kinds of acounts (gmail, msn, aol, etc) so pretty cool
- Thunderbird (email, free). Transmitting your email between pc and mac is easy.
- Deja Vu (backup, cheap). Works great.
- Super Duper (cheap). also backup, but better for cloning. I use an external HD, partitioned in 2. One for daily auto backup with deja vu, one for sporadic clones of hd.
- MAMP (free). Easy install of server. Also easy to install virtual hosts.
- Tigerlaunch (free). Adds a small button to the menu bar to quickly access your applications.
- CopyWrite cheap). Great for writing.
- CocoaMySql (free). Supposed to be very good.

That's about it. I'm also thinking about buying a license for Pages/KeyNote, as they are very cool apps.

These are the apps which I found to be recommended by many, and which I've used with 100% success so far. (sorry for not looking up all links).
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Chris Corbyn
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Post by Chris Corbyn »

TextMate screwed my file (seemingly unrecoverably) when I tried switching to UTF-8. I noticed the BOM was appearing on the page so I chose "utf-8 (no BOM)" and the whole thing flipped into gibberish. I was unable to fix it no matter what encoding I chose from thereon in so gave up and used Eclipse.

Put DarwinPorts on there so you can make use of a portage system. I remember somebody recently slating it for having no apps in the respository... well, now there are a shed-load in there.

MacBooks look cool but I couldn't justify the extra money for something with a tiny screen when I could just get a Mac mini and use my own screen... Notebooks are nice to have though. Emirates are to be the first airline to start fitting Wi-Fi onto their planes I believe. They're just about to go live with Cell/Mobile phone connectivity in-flight too. I'm sure having internet access in-flight would be far more entertaining than the movies they show :twisted: :)
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neophyte
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Post by neophyte »

Some folks around here are down on Zend Studio but on a Mac I think it is the best solution.
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Chris Corbyn
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Post by Chris Corbyn »

neophyte wrote:Some folks around here are down on Zend Studio but on a Mac I think it is the best solution.
Problem with Zend is that it's *just* for PHP development. I prefer something more generic and pluggable since these days I'm writing in other languages than just PHP. I don't care particularly for IDEs, provided the editor part works flawlessly and has decent highlighting support (with an understanding of PHPDoc).
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Post by reverend_ink »

You can try BBEdit for php and html, it does cost a bit, but does come with a free trial for you to check it out.

Eclispe is a free suite and is pretty powerful for more than just php.

NeoOffice - Openoffice for the Mac.

Cyberduck - Free FTP Program

MacMAME - for playing ROMs - great for wasting time between projects, or to wind down.

MacSaber - Turn your Mac into a Lightsaber. Uses the sensors on the CPU to make very cool saber sound effects.

Senuti - Play your tunes on your ipod on your Mac. Quite nice when you dont want to store all your songs on your laptop.

A great source for links to alot of cool opensource apps - Open Source Mac
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Ollie Saunders
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Post by Ollie Saunders »

Thanks for all the responses so far we definitely look into all these.
One specific question: is there a mac-version of subversion?
d3ad1ysp0rk
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Post by d3ad1ysp0rk »

ole wrote:Thanks for all the responses so far we definitely look into all these.
One specific question: is there a mac-version of subversion?
A mac version? Mac is basically pretty-Unix..
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Chris Corbyn
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Post by Chris Corbyn »

d3ad1ysp0rk wrote:
ole wrote:Thanks for all the responses so far we definitely look into all these.
One specific question: is there a mac-version of subversion?
A mac version? Mac is basically pretty-Unix..
The new intels are even more so. You can just about compile anything from source that will compile under *nix. Just install the Developer tools to get the GNU compiler collection etc.
matthijs
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Post by matthijs »

Chris, looks like you're not far away from yours too, isn't it? You just needs a bit more love from swiftmailer fans ...
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Ollie Saunders
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Post by Ollie Saunders »

Nah he's got a bit to go yet.
The new intels are even more so. You can just about compile anything from source that will compile under *nix. Just install the Developer tools to get the GNU compiler collection etc.
Oh OK, I thought there might have been a special OS specific version.
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Chris Corbyn
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Post by Chris Corbyn »

Well, I might just see how I get through the next month and make the remainder up myself :)

I have to say, it's extremely comforting to know people are actually willing to help me out in return for something I've done. I owe many people a very big thank you :)
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Post by timvw »

I've been using a macbook (core duo) for the last couple of weeks... I found the motion/shock detector in the screen an amazing idea at first, but after a while you become irritated by it ;) (Sitting in the couch.. And everytime you move your legs, you switch from linux to windows and back...)

Perhaps i'm hooked to much on PC but i still haven't seen a good reason to shelve out the extra books to get a macbook instead...
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Chris Corbyn
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Post by Chris Corbyn »

timvw wrote:Perhaps i'm hooked to much on PC but i still haven't seen a good reason to shelve out the extra books to get a macbook instead...
I think the main reasons I have become so hooked on Mac are that it's just a damn interesting OS. Sitting on top of UNIX just makes it (unlike Windows) fun to prod and poke. But on the front of it, it's an extremely easy system to use, and lets face it.... it's beautiful (can't help it!). All the kool kids have one :P

I've prodded and poked at a few systems in my giddyness to get one and it just makes me want one more. One thing that doe confuse me though is this: They ship with Tiger installed, but somehow over 20GB of disk space is already consumed by the OS and the default apps.... I still don't see what's using so much space and what is safe to free up because the /Applications folder is only about 4GB, yet /Library is over 9GB. You must be able to free a lot of that space up.
matthijs
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Post by matthijs »

Talking about Mac and software: just discovered something very cool in Textmate. A minute ago I accidentally dragged and dropped an image from the desktop on to a html file I was working on in Textmate. Textmate automatically adds the img tag, complete with src, width, height and alt attributes needed to reference that image!

I would also be interested to know what takes up so much space. Indeed, 20gb is quite a lot if you have a mere 60 gb hd. I bet there's some stuff like language/country files which can be removed.
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