Switch to a Mac

24 Jan 2005 16:46 - (1) comments

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.

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).

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.