codevader

I started my Rails development on a Windows machine. That wasn’t as bad as you might think - I had GNUTools installed and it was only things like RMagick and file permissions that gave me headaches. But I had an iMac at home that I was increasingly liking, so when it came time for my 3 year old Dell Precision M60 (great laptop!) to be replaced, I went for a shiny MacBook Pro.

Setting the Mac up for serious work has been interesting. There’s some great software out there, but in many categories there’s no clear leader, so its been a little trial and error to find what works for me. This is what I’m using now:

• Quicksilver - essential for any Mac
• iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08. Numbers is a pretty limited, but Keynote is great for presentations.
• NeoOffice - because Numbers is so limited (try importing a CSV that uses non-comma delimiters for instance. Can’t do!)
• Textmate - I’ve still got a lot to learn with this to make it into a useful tool
• muCommander - Finder is pretty annoying sometimes. muCommander is a real power tool
• VMWare Fusion - lets me run IE6 for previews, as well as Quickbooks which I use for billing. Flawless performance so far.
• Thunderbird for mail, with the Lightning calendar plugin. I’m not completely sold on Thunderbird. Leopard apparently has a much improved mail.app, so when I do the upgrade to Leopard I might switch.
• SyncroSVN - unfortunately there’s no Tortoise for Mac. SyncroSVN is the best solution I could find. Its not perfect, but it’ll do.
• Transmit - I tried Filezilla for Mac, buts its just awful. Transmit works beautifully
• iTerm - I gotta have tabs in my terminal. When I get leopard I’m sure I’ll switch back to Terminal
• CocoaMySQL - on the PC I used SQLYog. CocoaMySQL isn’t as powerful, but it still works very nicely.
• JellyFiSSH - a nice tool to bookmark SSH info
• Freemind - for mind mapping. Great for sketching out website maps, or just knocking ideas together
• Omnigraffle - essential for wireframing and drawing mockups of page layouts
• Skype - for our daily communication
• Adium - for communicating with those who don’t use Skype
• Google Desktop - also searches Gmail, which is quite handy
• MAMP - for the odd occasion when I need to do some PHP work
• Max - for ripping CDs
• Burn - for burning CDs and DVDs
• Seashore - a nice free image editor
• Growl - for notifications

And by far the most useful tool - Synergy - which lets me run one keyboard and mouse for the Imac and the MacBook Pro. My setup is the MBP with an extra 20″ screen attached, and the Imac right next to that. So the MBP screen usually has Thunderbird running or some less important task, the 20″ is my main work screen, and the iMac does the browser previewing and runs iTunes. Works beautifully.

Capetown.rb had its first meeting on Wednesday night. Attendance was way ahead of my expectations - 14 people turned up. The talks were interesting and I met a really enthusiastic bunch of people.

The slides are posted at http://www.capetownrb.org/meeting-1