Switch to a Mac
A couple days before christmas I bought a 15” powerbook. As a former Windows user I must say I love every detail about my Mac. From the DVD drive without a disk holder, to the wide screen and the ‘breathing’ power light.
But the best part is of course OS X (which was very easy to set up). OS X has a host of default applications like GarageBand and top-notch security. And because OS X is Unix it also helps me get some Unix skills. Following my brother’s advice I installed some additional software.
Handy Apps
If you think the searchbar in Firefox is cool, you’ll love Huevos. Press Command+Escape from any application and you get a Huevos pop-up to search on Google, Wikipedia or any other site you add to Huevos.
Quicksilver helps you find any file or start any application you want by pressing Command+Space and typing part of the application or file name.
JEdit is a free editor. I added some plugins like Project Viewer. JEdit can’t compete with an IntelliJ but I’ll use it for my PHP projects.
For Sftp I installed CyberDuck (I had to set it to active FTP to work).
Apache
OS X has Apache installed and running by default! But I needed to add PHP support and Mysql. This was no problem with Marc Liyanage’s Mac OS X Packages. After installing the package you can restart Apache from the Terminal with:
sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl restart
I had some problem finding the Apache/htdocs directory which is located in Library/WebServer/Documents/.
My switch to the Mac is now almost complete. A couple of things I’ll need to do is get rsync working and install CVS.