|
|
Andrei Zmievski |
| |
|
30-August-2004
Switched
I've switched. For the last 3 years I have been using Linux on a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop. It's been working fairly well, but lately the age of it has begun to show. The laptop emits loud fan noise, has problems with shutting down occasionally, and it's a pain to switch between wireless networks. Linux is great to develop on, but I have not come across any desktop environment that I would feel it excel at. So, having looked around, I narrowed my decision to IBM ThinkPad and Apple Powerbook. Rasmus has recently bought one of the former (T42, I believe), but read his posting and note how much time he had to spend to get certain things working (like suspend and wakeup). That is exactly the sort of thing that I am sick of. More and more of my friends and co-workers have been praising their Powerbooks. And why not? It's Unix under the hood after all, with a sexy GUI on top, all glued together with tight, usable, fast desktop glue, ready for coding, multimedia, connectivity - whatever you want. As of last Friday, I have a beautiful 15" aluminium Powerbook in my hands and I love it so far. Put it to sleep? Just close the lid. Wireless? I go to a coffee shop with free wireless connection and Powerbook discovers it and connects automatically. Development? I have full power of BSD, X11, gcc, vim, and all the rest at my fingertips. Mutimedia? Don't even get me started. Now I just need a list of cool apps/tips/tricks to make the laptop even better. I have switched and I am not going back. Posted at 14:41
|
Apple
Comments
Right on Andrei! I KNEW you would come over to our side some day... :) Posted by Eric Elliott on August 30, 2004 03:15 PMvim? How can anybody consider developing in that anything other than a huge pain? I gotta be able to fully use the mouse. In a GUI. Posted by Ben on August 30, 2004 03:16 PMBen, I can move around and change the much faster in vim than in any GUI IDE I have used to date. Posted by Andrei on August 30, 2004 03:19 PMI'd really like to know how! For example, if I want to cut and paste a block of text I have to count the number of lines, do "xx dd" (making sure I'm not in insert mode), manually move the cursor with the keyboard to another line (no scrollbars), then do "P". Positioning the cursor at various positions on a line is tedious as well - use the arrow keys. Well, you can speed it up a bit by jumping by word. If there's a way to use vim that's faster than using a mouse in a GUI I must be missing it. Posted by Ben on August 30, 2004 03:24 PMBen, Here's how I would select a couple of paragraphs of text and move them to another position. Shift-V (starts visual selection mode) I would suggest reading chapters on motion and moving around. :help motion.txt Hmm, that's new to me. I will check it out and see. You know, if Mac OS is built on BSD, I'm suprised the FOSS community hasn't put together a package equivalent to it. Posted by Ben on August 30, 2004 03:44 PMBen, Package equivalent? Are you thinking of something like http://fink.sf,net/ ? (there are a few others too). Andrei, my wife got me to give LaunchBar - http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/ - a second try. Now I have trouble starting LaunchBar itself if I accidentially quit it, that's how much I use it to open applications (and lots of other things).
My two Mac essentials are iTerm (a better Terminal, doesn't crash as much and supports tabbed terminals) and QuickSilver, which is such a good launching app you can dump everything else form your Dock, leaving it to only show applications that are currently running. Welcome to OS X :) Posted by Simon Willison on August 30, 2004 04:26 PMA few nice OSX apps: Launch apps, find contacts, look up words in dictionaries etc. quickly: Quicksilver http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ Multiple desktops: Desktop Manager http://wsmanager.sourceforge.net/ Posted by Lau Taarnskov on August 30, 2004 04:28 PMGeekTool (http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/) - Pretty output to your shell scripts. Posted by jj on August 30, 2004 06:18 PMWow a few days earlier than I had expected! Few tools I really enjoy: KisMAC - because I like to explore networks MacStumbler - because I like to benignly explore networks too Beyond that the usual include: SubEthaEdit - v2 now allows collaborative Internet based group editing (very cool). Solitaire Plus! - Apple should bring back Eric's and distribute it, but alas... Oh if I remember correctly, you do have a Bluetooth phone, you should check out some of the control systems (Salling Clicker is my preferred, but there are others). Also you'll find it amazingly easy to setup your GPRS (if you have it) over Bluetooth. Posted by Dan Kalowsky on August 30, 2004 07:42 PMSome stuff the posts reminded me that I should have emphasized. QuickSilver and LaunchBar do the same thing. I actually prefer QuickSilver (free), but it runs like a dog in Tiger so I've gone back to LaunchBar. I guess Objective Development is going to get my upgrade money. Whichever one you use should be the second item in your dock because you'll want to restart it if you have to quit. BBEdit is preferred by a lot of people who want a native mac-based GUI text editor. I can't stand their prices so I boycotted them by switching to vim and jEdit. There is a carbonized vim available, but it doesn't add much except some menu items and drag and drop. SubEthaEdit makes a great collaborative editor but its a little slow on large files (also, I think they're charging now, though I think it's free for you to use). GeekTool (which I love) will pretty much be outmoded by Dashboard in Tiger. SSHKeychain is very useful and integrates with Apple's Keychain. There is Fink (debian packages), DarwinPorts (BSD Ports) and Gentoo (portage) depending on your poison. I think I showed you Fink already (I can't remember as I got the flu just after I left). To get kCacheGrind installed you have to allow test packages and compile. The compile takes forever because Macs are dog slow at integer math. Hope this helps, terry Posted by terry chay on August 31, 2004 12:19 AMCurrently in my dock: Safari, Mail, iCal, Terminal, LaunchBar, SubEthaEdit, Transmit, Proteus, NetNewsWire, Photoshop, Illustrator, Preview, iTunes. Welcome to the OS X experience, hope you're as pleased as I've been. ;) Posted by Wesley Mason on August 31, 2004 05:43 AMWelcome on board. I've switched just over a year ago, after having used PCs for much longer than I care to remember (first PC was an Amstrad 1640, with 640kB or RAM). Being able to duplicate the setup of my FreeBSD servers, down to subversions of the different apps I'm using, does make me a lot more efficient. As does not having to spend at least an hour a week figuring out why my laptop is getting sluggish. The first week with my 17' PowerBook was spent with a stupid grin on my face as I kept finding little gems in OSX. I wish you the same type of honeymoon period with yours. In terms of apps: sshkeychain, useful when ssh'ing a lot :) Posted by Arnaud on September 1, 2004 02:27 AMAnd what about games ? Maybe Doom3 ? :D Posted by Fotomoto on September 2, 2004 04:35 AMHey Andrei, If you are used to work on multiple desktops, you might want to have a look at http://wsmanager.sourceforge.net/index.php best, Hi, I came in here via MMK. I've been using a PowerBook for the last year and a half and totally love it. I've put up a list of the apps I use; you may find it useful: http://jace.seacrow.com/tech/macosx (I'll be throwing in about 25 more items over the weekend.) Posted by Kiran Jonnalagadda on September 3, 2004 08:14 AM |