David Smeringe weblog

I recently decided to be dary – I ordered a MacBook Pro – the 15″ i7, 2.66ghz, with the highres (1680) screen. I got it last week, and so far all I can say is actually – WOW It does feel like ‘*Nix made right’. Of cource, there are some bridges to cross, but I didn’t expect anything else anyway.

I thought it’d be cool to post my experiences so far, and the stuff I’ve so far has bloated the computer with, so here we go

• The little characters commonly used by developers – the (in swedish at least) so called seagul wings – { and }. They can be found with the combination shift+alt+8or9. I would prefer one less key in the combo – but I’m getting used to it..
• The brackets [ and ] are under 8 and 9 as well, but solely with alt+number.. Still teaching my fingers that..
• The dollar sign.. On my swedish keyboard there is a € char above number 4. Found out that the $ char is there as well, but with alt+4.
• Change primary screen when using an external screen? first it seemed a bit problematic when I found solutions like, “close the computer, and press space bar on the keyboard which activates the computer a gain”. It’s far esier. Open dislpay settings and drag the toolbar to the screen that should be primary. Done..
• Clearing the DNS settings is done with (terminal) dscacheutil -flushcache

Some settings I’ve quicly changed…

• I quickly changed so that the F[1..12] keyboard buttons are F[1..12] buttons and not function keys. Now the function button is used to reach the function buttons behaviour instead. Better…
• Changed so that double clicking on window list minimizes the window.
• Changed size on dock (The menu list on a mac) and set it to auto hide (which also means that maximizing a window really uses the entire space and not just down to the top of the dock).
• The setup on the Dock – a lot of rearly used apps there, removed them (they are still in the Applications folder), and added the terminal (I use it a lot!) and some other more commonly used apps (like all browsers etc)

AAANND the apps

• Adium for chatting – It’s a superb IM client for most protocols
• Growl – a really cool notification app that integrates with most apps
• FileZilla client (FTP) – I’ve used under both Linux and Windows. By far the best FTP client. Easy to transfer from the PC by exporting/import the settings as XML.
• Skype
• NetBeans – my current IDE of choice
• Subversion – command line version so far.. Still missing a good client (would prefer an OSE one, otherwise the Versions app seems good)
• Microsofts RDP client
• MySQL server (also remember to copy/create a config file under /etc for admin apps to work..)
• MySQL Workbench
• Firefox with some of the common add ons for a web developer
• Chrome
• TextMate (heard it should be the developers best friend on a mac) – trying it out still.
• Smultron (a dev editor as well. testing that too)
• Tomboy. One of my favourite apps from the Linux world. A note taking app based on the wiki concept. really smooth.
• The Adobe CS5 Web package.. (I actually hoped that I could convert my CS4 license to a Mac one, but apperantly that’s not possibly now since they released the version 5.. buhu..
• I’m about to install the VirtualBox, but I’ve not come that far yet..

I think that’s it for now.. btw:

• four fingers sliding down – show all open windows..
• three fingers sliding left/right. Browser back/fwd (and such)
• two fingers sliding down/up. scroll
• two fingers clicking – right click

- I like it.

The only downside so far is my configuration mess up with my external keyboard. less than/greater then (<>) becomes §° instead (the key is actually lost in the mapping for some reason). Havn’t found a solution to that yet.

Cheers.