On Thursday, January 2, 2003, at 11:10 AM, Drew Taylor wrote:
I've recently gotten a Mac OS X (10.2.3) box up & running.
DREW TAYLOR WINS. FLAWLESS VICTORY.
1. Are there any local Mac mailing lists? I'm subscribed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] already.BBEdit, worth every penny. This editor was designed with the Perl programmer in mind (though it also works nicely with AppleScript, and any shell-based scripting language like Python or Ruby). If you know Perl, and perhaps a little AppleScript (just enough to call a Perl script), you can extend BBEdit in so many ways. Download the free trial (not BBEdit Lite, rather the full-version trial) from http://www.barebones.com/ and put it through its paces, you get 24 days (I think). I had a job last year programming in PHP, where I was fortunate enough to get to use a Mac, and I have to say that this text editor
2. What are your favorite/must have utilities?
Yes. Pluses include the sweet control over quoting and the spam filter system (very smoothly integrated) in a nice Cocoa interface. Minuses include slight slowness (perhaps more so on your more venerable machine), not very powerful feature set compared to Eudora and others -- for instance, you can't choose to download HTML images on a per-email basis which would be nice for those of us who leave this turned off but occasionally would like to view an email in HTML format.3. Are you using Mail for email? Plusses & minuses are welcome.
I hated Mail when it first came out but Apple did improve it quite a bit. I can't say it has any single feature that makes it a killer app, it's just the way that Mail integrates with everything that makes it feel like an extension of the OS, sort of. Like right now I'm composing this email in Mail, and if I had you in my iChat buddy list then I'd see a little green dot if you were online right now. This is really hardly worth switching over from Eudora if you know and love it, but if you just grow into using Mail, it becomes very comfortable.
Also, I appreciate that it is smoothly integrated with Address Book, which I keep iSynced to my Treo, though I'm sure you'll see lots more software that hooks into Address Book in the future. I think Mozilla has a nice mail client too, and I use that at work (on Win32), but there are things that I find myself missing from Mail.app when I am at work.
4. More in-depth books than "Missing Manual". Hints on hardware especially helpful."MacOS X Unleashed" looked good (more in-depth and less introductory than "Missing Manual", but I didn't read it. I'm reading "Learning Cocoa w/Obj-C" and I think it's a good book so far, but I don't think it's terribly in-depth. It's an introductory book.
Since you're on a Perl mailing list, I'll assume you're interested in development -- make sure you've installed the Developer Tools. It's a hefty few hundred MB but it's well worth it. You get gcc and also Project Builder, which is Apple's IDE for Cocoa and Java programming, plus the Java SDK (soon to support 1.4.1 IIRC) and other GUI/CLI utilities.6. Any other tips for a windows convert.
It's not Linux, so I think that those who approach it thinking that all Mac software is going to be open source/free are going to be disappointed. But just about any open source Unix app should run on MacOS X. Use Fink ( http://fink.sourceforge.net ) if you would like a package manager for historically-Unix software like XFree86 or the Gimp. (But if you prefer to roll your own, gcc comes with the Developer Tools.)
More and more I'm becoming comfortable with the ways that the OS is well-integrated with the applications, and applications are well-integrated with each other. Sometimes I wonder if I should be afraid (a la Windows' integration with Internet Explorer), but none of the integrations are "required", so it's a win/win situation.
Performance wise, it helps to have a lot of RAM. I'm assuming that on your beige you'll experience similar. It feels like the OS was designed to take advantage of the kind of hardware that will be rolling out over the next couple of years -- forward thinking, but a bit debilitating for those of us who are using the machines of today or yesterday. The JVM is dog slow. I have a 500mHz G3 w/384MB and it's just not worth running most large Java apps (plus they kind of stand out against the "native" Cocoa/Carbon apps on MacOS X). This is especially sore for me because I like Java and develop with it at work.
I really love MacOS X -- it's not completely faultless, but it gives me the power and features of Linux but without making me micromanage every little detail of the OS. You can micromanage if you want -- but if you just want to get stuff done, the OS pretty much takes care of itself.
Erik
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Erik Price
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Erik Price
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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