Attempting to work with OSX..much to learn

Robby Russell — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 19:59:04 -0500

I’m playing around with my powerbook at a coffee shop with my girlfriend who is doing homework on her Linux laptop. I am trying to give OSX an honest attempt but I am finding it to be a bit a bit unix-but-not-so-unix like. Another weird thing is programs. There are some beautiful programs, but they all seem to be using the native OSX theme, so it’s nothing exceptionally special. A blog posting program is what I need right now (trying Ecto) but it’s a free trial. This is something that I haven’t had to deal with much in the Linux world. BloGTK does pretty much the same thing..and is open source.

Perhaps I don’t know where to look.

I also tried out TextMate earlier today, was able to connect to my development server through samba and it worked alright. In the end, it’s just another editor and I didn’t see it as such a remarkable improvement from using the programs that I develop with in Linux. A few things that I didn’t check where to see if it had native subversion and cvs support. I’ve gotten used to right clicking and committing files to my repositories from programs like KDevelop and this is also available in emacs (and many other free programs).

So, I don’t forsee myself leaving my comfortable Linux world anytime soon in favor of paying for programs that might look prettier..but I don’t feel any more efficient in them. However, I haven’t spent a lot of time with this yet and will continue to give it a try…but at the moment, it will be my coffee shop and testing box.

next day

So, I am back at the coffee shop again. I wasn’t able to post the above entry with Ecto for some reason. MarsEdit worked however. It kept complaining about not being able to parse the response from the web service. (perhaps a typo bug?)

I have found fugu for sftp/scp transfers and I am playing with TextMate. I don’t see yet what all the excitement is about yet. I will keep playing around with it though on my current project and use fugu to test on my development server as I haven’t had a chance to get rails running on osx yet.

Robby on Rails: Attempting to work with OSX..much to learn

Attempting to work with OSX..much to learn