Craig Koster

Once You Go Mac…

I’d been wanting to get a Mac for quite some time but I had a pretty decent laptop and wasn’t ready to spend a few thousand on a new one.

About four months ago we received a nice refund on our taxes so, after paying off some bills, I was able to get a 17″ MacBook Pro loaded with 4 GB of RAM. It’s a beautiful computer and so far it runs like a champ (knock on wood) . Physically, it’s just built much more nicely than any other PC I’ve had and the design is very clean and minimal – something I like.

I’ve used Windows my whole life so getting used to Mac OS X took a few days but I quickly became hooked.  Now I only use Windows via VMWare Fusion when I’m doing .NET development or SharePoint stuff – for everything else I’m in OS X.  

I’m just now getting around to setting up a nice development environment on OS X to build web sites and some iPhone applications.

Here are the tools and applications I’ve been using to develop on the Mac:

XCode / Interface Builder
Apple’s development IDE.  Very nice environment to build Cocoa and iPhone applications in.   

Coda
Beautiful and slick IDE for web development.  Integrates well with Subversion and has a ton of nice features.

Versions
Nice Subversion client.  I’ve never used Subversion before and this piece of software made it easy.

MAMP
Mac + Apache + MySQL + PHP = Nice!  Way, way better than trying to configure each stack on its own.

Color Schemer
I actually found this a couple years ago and have been using the Windows version for a while.  They just came out with a Mac version.

Pixelmator 
Very nice image editing software that comes very close to duplicating Photoshop’s features.

So far, I’m loving development (and everything else) on the Mac.  It’s a great environment to build in once you get started.  I still use Windows and Visual Studio and they’re still like my favorite pair of old worn out jeans, but this new pair of jeans is feeling pretty good right now.

Friday, January 23rd, 2009