Loud Baking

While I was away, I wasn’t 100% on break… Among the work related stuff I’ve done was revamping my whole dev environment, hardware as well as software.

For a little over a decade now, I have been a Windows user. In the early days, it was because Mac was just too expensive for what my parents could afford for my toys; but since all the Mac-frenzy started, it was more out of fear of loosing some precious time adapting to a new OS (and all what comes with it) than anything else really. I finally decided to give it a try early this year with a Mac mini to start with but that didn’t impress me much at first, mainly because I was never really giving it a real chance to. Only a month or two later, when I got the MacBook Air as a gift from my partner, that I really started enjoying and appreciating the new OS.

I went ahead and purchased the Mac OS X, installed that on the mini, hoping that it will push me into using that little machine some more until I identified the real reason behind my constant bouncing back to Windows: multiple displays. I know you have ’spaces’ in Mac but I still prefer the physical black separation that I get from working with 2 screens (back then), the same reason why I’d rather have 2 x 21″ screens instead of one big display. To my big deception, the mini was not fit for the multiple displays setting because of it’s low-end graphic card - same for the Air.

Around the same time, I was revamping my desk, making it more ergonomic and much simpler. A solid wood board with a metallic bar going horizontally across to support the extra weight, 2 metallic frames for the legs, a keyboard/mouse tray (#02-ORB439BK) w/ ball bearing arm (#02-ARMLKS) and a multi-display desk mount (#30-500-B16-04). The multiple displays were used back then as follow: one on the mini, 2 for the PC and one switching between the FreeBSD box and the docked laptop. Given the fact that I could run all these OS from a central machine, I decided it was time to invest in a real beast, the Mac Pro, for which I had to add an extra VGA card, a wireless ethernet card (- )can you believe this machine comes with no wireless included?) and some RAM.

Once all that was plugged, the only PC left around was a Toshiba laptop. The temptation to bounce back to Windows was slowly dying and the current setup was only contributing to that.

Now, a couple months later and after having toyed with different tools, here are the ones that I felt worked well for me:

• Adium
• Calendar
• Firefox 3 (add-ons: Read it later, Firebug)
• [Fireworks CS4]
• Mail
• MySQL Administrator
• Office 2008
• Parallels (running: DBDesigner 4 on WinXP)
• Skype
• TextMate (bundles: CakePHP, FTP/SSH, Trac)
• Time Capsule

And finally, I keep all files (local sandbox, remote projects, etc.) in SVN repositories for easy access to my files from anywhere. That pretty much covers it all. Since I am new to Mac, maybe there are stuff I’m missing out on, if so, please share. Also, what’s your approach on having your development environment follow you (files, tools, etc.)?