Comments on: The guilty man speaks (of Mac OS X)

By: Kumar

Kumar — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:23:20 +0000

Well, for me it was a drastic change from the Windows Environment.

I was overwhelmed with the MAC, but when I go home and login into my windows laptop, it’s mayhem.

I always have to remember, or at-least keep it at the back of my head, “Where am I”. So, that I can switch to Windows or MAC mode.

By: Sidu

Sidu — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:07:31 +0000

And BTW, I forgot to mention - Cocoa is the most awesomest UI framework ever. It hammers everything, Swing, SWT, WinForms, Qt, GTK etc. hands down. The guys at NextStep got it right; I wish the others had leaned from them. Try it out and tell me what you think.

And the trackpad gestures (pinch, zoom, scroll) are simply awesome.

By: Sidu

Sidu — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:04:22 +0000

The Command/ Ctrl conundrum is a problem especially on Java apps (I face the same issues on IntelliJ). Apps that follow OSX’s UI guidelines (which is pretty much all native OSX apps) work very consistently. In fact all shortcuts are common across all apps (Command + , for preferences, for example).

It took me a few months to get used to it (I was on Ubuntu before that) and it was pretty annoying. I persevered because some of my fellow hackers swore by OSX. Now, a year later, I wouldn’t consider anything but a Mac Pro for my next laptop, and be damned to the expense (my current MacNook Pro is courtesy ThoughtWorks). BTW those hackers I mentioned earlier were hardcore FreeBSD, Gentoo and Fedora+KDE - they started on OSX with dual boot into their favourite OS, but now if you ask them they’ll tell you it’s been several months since they booted into anything but OSX.

A few tools that might help: Visor, Growl, Disk Inventory X, Porticus, Skim, SMCFanControl, Sequential.

You get used to the quirks of Darwin Ports after a bit; if you were a Gentoo/BSD guy you’d be right at home (ask them sometime and see how they crib about apt-get :)).

By: Hemant

Hemant — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:50:05 +0000

Toni,

There is a bunch of stuff thats broken in Macports because of Snow Leopard update. Moreover, ports packages are still external to System and thus say if I do, “port install mercurial”, I will end up with one more version of Python on my machine (not a agreeable situation imho).

And yeah I am loving spaces, but there do not map to screens (which is different display altogether).

By: Toni Bergholm

Toni Bergholm — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:09:54 +0000

for apt-get, try http://www.macports.org/install.php
actually it’s more like free/openbsd like package management, but you can install easily opensource libs/apps.

In OS X there is spaces that give you multiple desktops and you can set applications to start on which ever desktop you want.