Switching to Mac #1
Ever since I started doing Ruby for the most part instead of .NET I wanted to get a Mac. I always wanted to get a Powerbook, but never could because most of the work I was doing was for Windows. Now that this is no longer the case, I got myself a Mac Book Pro yesterday.
General impressions.
My Mac knowledge is about that of a “mother who uses computer for email and internet”. I’ve never spent any significant amount of time on one and no development experience at all.
This is my second day and so far I have mixed impressions. The thing that I hate the most so far is how lackluster window resizing in OSX is. That tiny little resize corner is the only way to resize a window. Often, it ends up being below the screen edge and becomes even more of a hurdle. Windows windows resizing is much better.
I was very pleasantly surprised by Adium. After 10 minutes it became clear that this is by far the best IM client I’ve ever used.
Finder is the second big disappointment. There are some major usability issues there. No tree view is the big one. Column view is nice, but would be even nicer with a tree view. Can’t mix column/list view with icon view.
Ruby on Rails impressions.
I’m really puzzled why Mac is the platform of “choice” for RoR development. I’m following along this guide and getting the stack set up is hell comparing to Windows. The fact that I need to install 1GB worth of developer libraries just to get to actually installing is nutty. The “sudo port install ruby rb-rubygems” command has been running for about 20 minutes now while I typed this entire post. My first time installing RoR stack on Windows took about 15 minutes all together: download Ruby, RubyGems, MySQL. Install both. Install Rails gem. Done. That was almost as easy as installing .NET 
Anyways… port install is done now…
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