Friday (08/31/07)
Made The Switch 6:32 pm
My Macbook arrived this morning, and I’ve been spending most of the day moving my data over and finding new software.
I’ve got my FireFox bookmarks moved over along with my emails and settings; Adium and Quicksilver have both been in installed, along with the necessary iAlertU and MacSaber.
The Textmate trial has also been installed, but as a previous Notepad++ user I have yet to really get a gasp on it. Any tips would be appreciated.
I have not yet bought Microsoft Office or iWork, so any tips on perhaps some open source or free alternatives would also be appreciated. The Adobe CS3 Design Standard suite should be on its way.
Basically, I don’t have much of a clue yet, so to any Mac users out there: Please send my way any tips/good software (free is even better)/whatever, and I’ll try to put them to good use.
I eat food. I listen to music. I sleep. Sometimes. I drink lots of coffee. I make pretty pictures. I talk to people. I believe in things. I write stuff. I take photographs. I have a laughing addiction. I am human. 
Congrats!!!11one!!1~
I recommend OpenOffice — http://openoffice.org.
@Bennett: Yep, I’ve now installed NeoOffice (the Mac vesion), and I’m pretty happy with it so far.
Congratulations!
NeoOffice (www.neooffice.org) is a great Office alternative, but iWork is pretty slick. I personally like iWork because the things I do arent complicated and I don’t need 1000 features. iWork is simple and easy for me to get and get out painlessly.
Transmit (panic.com/transmit) and CocoaMySQL (cocoamysql.sourceforge.net) are essential web development tools (in addition to TextMate of course!)
Regarding Textmate… there are some shortcuts I use ALL the time >>
Ctrl-Shift-
If you find Textmate isn’t a good fit, you may wish to try Coda instead.
Textmate seems to be pretty decent, but I haven’t fully switched to it yet. I use BBedit and TextWrangler (BBEdit’s FREE little brother). Both BBEdit and TextWrangler have better search and replace features and you can open files directly through FTP/SFTP. BBEdit used to be the tool that won developers over to a Mac.
Textmate does have code completion (it will close tags, brackets and quotes) but I haven’t gotten used to it yet and I am not sure it saves me that much time. Again, if you are looking for free then TextWrangler takes it in my opinion.
As for Office or iWork, I would say depends on how you use it. With iWork 08, you have Pages instead of Word, Keynote instead of PowerPoint, and now Numbers instead of Excel. Personally, I think the Apple apps are are better hands down—Word is plain bloated. But, I don’t live in my own little world and realize that the 30-slide show I created may have to end up on a PC. Keynote will export to PowerPoint, but you still need to tweak it. I have a feeling it is the same for Pages and Numbers. If you will be doing a lot of interacting with PC people , then Office might have an advantage. If not, then iWork. If you go with Office there is an educational version that is much cheaper.
With CS3 on the way you’ve got the bread and butter tools. If you are doing a lot of CSS work then check out CSSEdit at http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/
It is the best $30 I have spent. I have it set up as the external CSS editor in Dreamweaver and hardly use the built CSS editor for DW anymore. You can see the effects of your CSS instantly in a preview window. I don’t get a kick-back from them, so if you want to know more visit their site rather than read my raves about it.
Adium is a great IM app. iChat is great, but doesn’t support many other IM-services unless you go through Jabber, which can be a little cumbersome. Adium allows IM with most of the major players.
iBiz is great for time tracking and invoicing if you need that.
As for other software, if you can narrow it down, I could help more.
A previous Notepad++ user myself, I found TextMate to be confusing at first as well. From what I’ve found, its power comes in its bundles (tabstops etc) and its simplicity. The point of it, I think, is for tabs to only show up for projects. Otherwise, files just appear in their own windows. Which makes sense I guess, but it’s a different way of working with things.
You’ll really really want to change the bundles to fit your needs.\
As for software, I highly recommend NewsFire and OmniFocus. I’ve been using iChat myself, as I prefer my apps to blend into the OS X environment. Adium does that, just not as well as iChat. The same goes for Safari vs. Firefox. I only use Firefox for debugging, because it can get sluggish and it doesn’t really fit into OS X at all. There have been promises for Firefox 3 to blend in better, but in its current state those promises are looking empty.
I’ll just finish this up by listing some key apps. You have QS already so I’ll leave that out.
AppZapper (Never drag apps to the trash, do this instead.)
Awaken (Hurrah for smart alarm clocks!)
CandyBar/Pixadex (For icon changing.)
Colloquy (IRC, though I’ve recently found myself loving IRSSI)
CSSEdit (A godsend for CSS editing. I make it a point to use this for all of my CSS editing, instead of TextMate)
Disco (A bit infamous but it IS a good app)
Flow (When it comes out. Very nice FTP app.)
SnapZ Pro (The best video recorder/screencast app, hands-down.)
MAMP PRO (Seriously, use this for your local host.)
Paparazzi! (For getting screenshots of webpages.)
Pipette (For getting the hex codes for colors on your screen, like #FF0000.)
Pixelmator (Hard to explain, it’s an image editor without the sluggishness of Photoshop. Not out yet, but it is um, “out”, if you know what I mean.)
Quinn (Good for procrastination.)
The Unarchiver (StuffIt can stuff it.)
Transmission (Great BT app.)
VMware Fusion (I’ve found this to be better than Parallels.)
I have a lot of apps I guess. Sorry I don’t have the time to link all of these, they should all be the first results in Google.
@Brandon: Know of a good list somewhere of all the good shortcuts?
@Kyle: Yeah, I’ve heard of that one as well…I might give it a shot, but with all the ravings I’ve heard about Textmate I think I’ll make sure I give it a good chance first.
@Blake: Believe it or not, I’ve always used the Web Dev Toolbar in FireFox for my CSS editing…Simple, but it’s done the trick. What’s the advantages of using a program like this instead? I’ll have to check out iBiz as well, as I’m also looking for a good time tracker/invoice app.
@Alex: Bundles are one of the main things that drove me to trying out Textmate, though currently I have yet to figure out how to use them. Perhaps that will go on the to-do list for tonight. Great list of apps there, I’ll have to go check those out.
@All: Thanks for all the crazy-awesome tips so far, keep ‘em coming.
I tried to post some of them, but I think I must have typed something that WordPress thought was code and it was deleted from my post.
I found this overview:
http://projects.serenity.de/textmate/tutorials/basics/
Also, just by typing a tag name, and hitting the tab key, you can get a lot of functionality. It works with tags like head, doctype, body, a, div, img, table, form, meta, style, script and many more. It also works in code, such as PHP or Ruby. Just type something like ‘function’ and hit tab.
Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be writing your own snippets and modules. It’s really easy and if you do a lot of repetitive things, it can save you tons of time.
Awesome, thanks man.
Question to anybody: I’ve been changing a few of my icons using LiteIcon, and I can’t figure out how to make my desktop icons bigger. The icon I’m using is large enough, I just can’t figure out how to display it large on the desktop. Any help for a hopeless icon-changer?
Nevermind. Cmd-J FTW! Thanks Justin.
Journler is excellent for journling. It is the app that gots me wishing for a Mac.
journler.com
Just curious, how do you like your mac so far? I am planning on getting a Macbook pretty soon here but I’m just looking right now to see what other people really think about theres. Thanks
Nice blog, nice website, found you through Virb.com. How’s your Macbook working for you? And did you get the iPod as part of their college students deal?
@ASE: Looks interesting, thanks for the tip.
@Alex & Matthew: It’s working out great. Yep, I did the free iPod deal, as well as the deal on buying Adobe software along with it. Apparently there’s a printer rebate as well, though I didn’t do that one.
Good news on your purchase. I’m sure you’ll be happy with it. Personally I started down the Open Office route, however Apples latest iWork is really nice - albeit commercial software. I tend to use both of these. Open Office for the Mac has always been a side project for them, but they have some big players now taking note and I think this will improve now
For FTP use I use Cyberduck which is a great little app. I also use Camino as a browser which is based on Firefox, but is faster. Finally, if you use Windows I’d definitely give Parallels a go - its a great app and I use it for my accounts and for testing websites
Hope this helps
Thanks, Cyberduck looks interesting.
@Alex
I had been using Windows machines since the DOS days and I picked up a MacBook Pro in January. I used it as my primary machine for about 6 or 7 months but I switched back to using Windows (Vista specifically) as my primary OS a month or two ago.
Overall, the Mac is a very good machine, but it doesn’t fit my workflow and I was never as productive on it (using TextMate) as I was on Windows (using SciTE and Visual Studio). My main problem with the Mac is that (as a power user) it is *too simplified.* While Windows may not be as easy to use as OS X, in OS X its all simple or nothing simple - there’s no in-between. Basically what I mean by that is that you’re either happy with the lack of options and limited abilities or you sit in bash 24×7 typing console commands. Other things I didn’t like were poor wireless (I believe this is because of the aluminum case on the MBP) and OS X doesn’t seem to do too well with handling CPU priorities - I have a top of the line MBP and it lags up on a regular basis without running too many programs. Also, the lack of native .NET support is kind of annoying since C# is amazing, but Mono is still okay.
I still use my MBP on a regular, but not for anything too intensive.
Interesting. So far, I’ve been finding quite the opposite–While I haven’t had a chance to do much developing yet, I’ve found that through using Quicksilver and such I’m able to get around much faster. I hope to start learning my way around Textmate soon, so we’ll see how that goes.
It seems to run much faster than my 3ghz machine w/ 1.5gigs of RAM, and the wireless hasn’t caused any problems for me so far (though I don’t have the macbook pro, so no aluminum if that is the cause).
‘Course, I also never did anything in C#, so that doesn’t cause any issues with me.
I only have the wireless issues in my apartment building and they only occur with my MBP. I think it gets confused by all the different access points because it works fine at my parents’ house. My Wii and work laptop don’t have any issues in the apartment building.
Quicksilver is a sweet app. On Windows I always used to just create shortcuts in the C:\Windows\System32 directory and do a Win+R in order to quick launch random apps but after using Quicksilver I decided I had to find a better solution for my Windows computers, which is Launchy. It has a good interface (with the default skin anyways) and has the basic features of Quicksilver that I use. Launchy also has a built in calculator as well (Quicksilver might too, never tried doing calculator operations with it).
You should try some C#, its the most well designed language out there (although Ruby might beat it in elegance, C# is a close 2nd).
Now here’s an interesting problem I’ve been having:
As I’m typing, the window will suddenly change focus or the text become highlighted which will cause me to accidentally type over it.
I thought that perhaps I was accidentally touching the trackpad, so I tried turning off trackpad clicking (I was already using the ignore accidental input option). This didn’t seem to work, and I knew I wasn’t hitting the actual click button.
After quite a while I was finely able to pinpoint the issue–on the sides of the trackpad where one rests their palms while typing, if pressure is applied just right it will actually make the macbook click as though I hit the button under the trackpad.
Some Googling revealed that a bloated battery could possibly cause this, so I took out the battery to take a look. It doesn’t look bloated, however taking it out did seem to fix the problem.
Looks like a call to Apple is in order for tomorrow morning…
Anybody experience anything like this before?
Here’s me.
Here’s me being jealous.
Here’s me being jealous, and trying to justify myself that I, too, need a Mac.
Here’s me leaving your site because I’m jealous.
There goes me.
(Congrats)
@Eliot’s comment above regarding the annoying trait of the mouse to highlight over text and switch focus and such…
I have the EXACT same issue with my Macbook Pro. I am a Windows native, so perhaps this just plagues us, as we are less used to the mac track pad. I think its cause is exactly as you describe above; my hand hits the trackpad occasionally as I type, causing it to interpret the touch as a click. I won’t disable trackpad clicking, as I love the feature when it functions as intended. The only trick I’ve been able to come up with so far is to make sure my mouse is positioned at the bottom of any text box or page that I am typing on. That way, if you accidentally touch the pad, the interpreted click will be on the bottom of the document, which is, in essence (unless you’ve pressed enter in the blank space below your text a bunch of times) the same as clicking on the last spot your cursor can possibly occupy. i.e. the place you are currently typing (unless you’re editing previously entered text)
This has pretty much eliminated the issue for me, but it is still annoying…
@Darren: Actually, my problem happened to be a swollen battery–so if I put pressure in the right places next to the trackpad, it caused pressure that triggered a click. Try pressing the areas around the trackpad to see if it does this, and then try taking out the battery (make sure you have it plugged in) and doing the same thing.
I got Apple to replace my battery and everything works fine now.