My before-I-even-start setup on a Mac
We’re rolling out new Macs at work in my team, and so I’m revisiting my must-have-done-before-I-start list. This is a list of things I’ve picked up from a lot of helpful and friendly mac users along the way:
Setup:
- An up-to-date setup of Rails, Subversion and MySQL. Dan Benjamin has great guides on Hivelogic. He does local builds off the source which mean tidier upgrades. Gets a bit tricky with the original bundled mac bits though.
- Set up php. It’s already on a new mac, but you need to configure it. Here are instructions to set it up but I substitute Textmate (as below) as my weapon of choice for editing text files.
- I haven’t actually got this working but it’s a must-have for work macs if you have a massive NAS. Set up Time Machine on a NAS. That way if your laptop gets run over you know you have everything backed up.
- Get rid of the iDisk crap in the sidebar
- Open a finder window (set focus on Finder)
- Click “Finder” menu then “Preferences…”
- Then click on the toolbar icon for “Sidebar”
- Uncheck “iDisk” – fourth one down
- Close “Preferences pane”
- I also like to show the full path in the status bar - go to View, then “Show Path Bar”
Free:
- Firefox with a bunch of handy add-ons
- FireBug for web page development and debugging
- YSlow – for web page optimisation
- Web Developer Toolbar – handy for disabling js, images, css, etc
- Talon – Screen grab long, scrolling screens in their entirety.
- http://www.sequelpro.com/ – desktop mysql client
- Skitch – great tool for grabbing screenshots and annotating them. Also has online hosting and websharing capabilites
- xcode – Install off the OS/X disk
- Remote Desktop for Mac – Connect to your Windows machines using remote desktop.
- Microsoft Messenger for Mac – Chat with your Windows Live buddies. We run a corporate chat server using Jabber, which I use iChat for.
- Skype for long distance telephony
- Tweetdeck for twittering away. Although since twitter got lists I use this less
- Stuffit Expander – expander utility for rar files and more (OSS Alternative I don’t use but you might like: UnArchiver)
- Virtual Box – To run any virtuals you need. Alternative to vmware fusion or parallels
- Quicksilver 2 – quick-launcher, use the mouse less. Like Spotlight on steroids. Run it, press ctrl-space, and have access to launch any app or take a bunch of actions
- chmox – a chm reader for Apple. (Microsoft Help file format)
- DivX – divx video player for Mac
- Dropbox – storage in the cloud with mac, windows, web and iphone clients, and sharing with friends. use this referral link to get extra storage.
- http://cyberduck.ch/ – FTP client with nifty features like double-click to rerun past jobs.
Commercial
- http://macromates.com/ – TextMate
- 1Password – Secure password storage. A gift form a friend, I couldn’t live without
- http://www.panic.com/coda/ – Coda is a great web page editor for editing rails, php or static files like css / html. Includes syntax highlighting and all the usual bells and whistles. Integrated support for subversion is nice too.
- Joe Bergantine’s .seestyle Coda theme styled to look like the editor that stars in Railscasts (easy on the eyes, light on dark)
- AppZapper – described as the uninstaller Apple forgot. Worth the $13.
- Microsoft Office for Mac – I bought and tried iWork, and I’ve been playing with Google Docs. I tried NeoOffice a while ago. Microsoft Office is worth it. I have Professional, which includes Entourage with support for Exchange.
Things I haven’t bought yet but want in future:
- Omnigraffle – A mac equivalent of Visio. A little pricey but hey, cheaper than Visio.
- Balsamiq desktop – an adobe air app, which is a really handy and high tech way of producing hand-drawn-esque IA in an Adobe Air App
- Versions – a really nice GUI Subversion client
Hmm. Interesting. Is Deals Direct backed with a PHP or RoR backend? As you have mentioned both in your post.
Also is there a reason to go with Subversion instead of git, as it seems all the Ruby guys are moving to git?
Hi Scott.
Deals is a LAMP stack, through and through. We use subversion at work, and I’m a long-time fan of subversion. I like it because my hosting provider gives me free subversion which I use to back up php, rails, and .net stuff. I haven’t really spent much time looking at git but @garrydanger agrees with you
Mark,
That’s cool. We use subversion at work as well simply because git was not available when we made our transition from CVS
But for personal projects like OzBargain I much prefer to use git. A lot of time when I am working on something, I can just say “hmm I think I want to create a repository for it”, run `git init` and it’s done!
[From @hk328]
To compliment Mark’s extensive list, here are some of my fav apps:
If you ever find out why Mac users are more loyal to their Macs then to king, country or spouse – I hope you’ll post.
We’re a bunch of tools. We choose more difficult because we feel we have more control. We pay more so we can run free software. We end up buying more software to make it work than we should need to. And in the end we all secretly run Windows on a spare PC or a virtual machine because there’s always that one thing you can’t do with a mac. And in spite of all this we still love them. Maybe just because they’re shiny.
Nice list, thanks. A 2nd for the commenter who suggested Evernote, it’s fantastic, ditto for Growl (I always forget it’s not part of the OS). I also use Adium for my messengering needs.
I had Time Machine working to a disk file for a while but it was really flakey so I just bought an external USB drive for $100 and use that.