Developing on the Mac
Posted by Joseph Nusairat
This past weekend Brian and I were at Codemash and while talking to Neal Ford and Joe O'Brien at one of the sponsors parties, the topic of development tools and tips on the Mac came up. Both Brian and I are relatively new Mac owners. He has the PowerBook, I have the smaller MacBook. Both Neal and Joe have owned Macs for a while, and started rattling off must have utilities. I started frantically scribbling down notes of all the programs they were suggesting and sure enough like any good geek I went back to my hotel room later and googled all of them, downloaded some and started playing with them.
Quicksilver
A sleek way to launch apps. You can basically hit a predefined key, a small screen will pop up a box and you just type the name of app you want. Like spotlight it tries to auto complete and will learn what you type more often. In addition you can also do some fancy associations of applications.
Snapz Pro
Good for screen shots, a must have for presentation nerds.
iTerm
Better than terminal, it has a tabbed interface.
Witch
Awesome tool used to switch between screens. I know many former Windows users complain about not being able to switch between individual windows. With this you can.
Path Finder
A fancier Finder; smoother and cleaner.
News Fire
Net News Wire
RSS News Readers.
Side Note
Nice tool that pops up from the left side and allows you to write and store quick notes.
iClip
Another tool used for creating clips for presentations, I have not played around with this one yet.
iAlertU
Allows you to use your Mac remote as a car alarm on the computer. Will even take a picture of the person trying to touch your computer if you mess with it when armed.
Hivelogic
This last one is nothing to do with Mac tools per se. However, if you want to learn Ruby on Rails and have a Mac, this is a good tutorial on how to setup your Mac for RoR development.
BTW, on the Mac you use Alt+Tab to switch applications and Alt+~ to switch windows within an application. I had my Mac for years before figuring that out. If you're used to Windows/Linux where Alt+Tab goes through every window, it's odd at first but I find I actually like Apple's way better. Also, for bringing up a minimized application, Quicksilver is often fastest. For example if you Alt+Tab to Firefox and have it minimized, Apple leaves it minimized. If you open Quicksilver and type in Firefox and hit enter it will restore the minimized window. Hope that helps, I wasn't seeing the point of the witch software but maybe it offers something else I missed at a cursory glance.