Wednesday, September 24, 2008

What I found in my switch to Mac, Drupal-wise

The last 7 days I've *had* to work on a MacBook pro, due to me switching jobs, and this being the only available laptop.

It's a beautiful machine, but making the switch was... well... interesting =)

Here are some of the things I found about switching to a Mac from Windows AND working with Drupal:
  • If you want to run apache/mysql in a Mac, best to install MAMP. It's dead simple! Large download though (then I found about universal binaries and architecture-specific dowloads--d'oh!)
  • For text editing, TextMate is great, but it's not free. It can sort-of upload stuff via FTP with an added bundle, but you have to type in a lot of information manually for each file. I found out you can use the Fetch FTP client (commercial, but free to educational institutions and other uses) to automatically FTP your files whenever you change them with any text editor (you have to download them via Fetch first!) So, now instead of TextMate I could get by with other editors like Smultron.
  • For screengrabbing, get Skitch! You'll love it.
  • Although the Mac does run under UNIX, it does not have CVS support by default. So you'll have to install a client of some sort. I haven't gotten this far, though (I use CVS from our test server); as I understand it, you can get it from the Development tools provided by Apple (but it's a huge download)--more about that here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

For FTP you may also want to check out CyberDuck (free) and Transmit (Shareware). Both very solid programs. I haven't yet tried Fetch... do you think its worth a shot?

Jano said...

Thanks for the tip!

Fetch works great for editing files; just set it up so the "Edit" button fires your favorite text editor (say, TextMate), and whenever you save from there Fetch automatically uploads the just-saved file to the same spot.