Moving to Mac: FTP

On my PC, I used to use LeechFTP, and more recently moved over to FileZilla. The main reason I used these programs over WS-FTP was because so many times when I was pushing files, I was pushing lots and lots of tiny files. These programs were multi-threaded, so they would upload a dozen files at the same time, cutting down the upload time by leaps and bounds, since it took longer to open & close connections than it did to actually transfer the file in most cases.

I tried FileZilla on the Mac, but I can say it’s just a port from the Windows version, and a poor one at that. It looks and feels clunky, and still has all the issues the Windows version has.

I then moved over to Transmit. It still has the same key feature I needed (multithreaded uploads/downloads), plus a whole lot more, including interesting features like Amazon S3 support, sync, Mac OS integration (Dock, Automater, etc), tabs and server to server transfers. Give it a try, you won’t be sorry.

Moving to Mac: SVN

I loved TortoiseSVN. I miss TortoiseSVN. I’ve found a great tool for the Mac that does a very poor impression of TortoiseSVN, but is still useable. scplugin is a Finder contextual menu item that exposes most SVN commands. It’s worked like a charm, so far.

Wanting to also see some GUI stuff, I downloaded svnX, which is a great tool, also. The combination of the two I think will suit me just fine.

Yes, I have subclipse installed, but just like on Windows, I don’t like using it. The only reason it gets installed is so .svn directories don’t get copied over as assets when I compile my Flex projects 🙂

Moving to Mac: Text Editor

So notepad.exe was my bread & butter on Windows for doing text editing. Not very powerful, but it got the job done. While attempting to play with various config files (more on that in subsequent blog posts), I came across the program TextMate. It’s got all sorts of neat text-editor features, but the best one, by far, is the ability to use the GUI text editor from Terminal. Just type in something like “sudo mate /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf” and it opens right up in TextMate. Hit save, and it prompts for your password again, but is otherwise very very slick.

Moving to Mac: Installations

Greetings from my new MacBook. I ended up picking up a refurb for a $850, and threw in 4gb of ram ($110) and a 320gb Hard Drive ($165).

I’m going to chronicle the journey of ditching my Windows laptop for my MacBook, the good and the not-so-good. Starting with the difficult.

First thing I did was rip out the standard 80gb drive and put in the new 320gb drive. I re-installed everything from the restore disks, easy-as-pie.

If you want to install OS X on a non-formatted hard drive, boot from your OS disk and go to the Utilities menu and open Disk Utility to format the drive.

The next thing I did was open up the BootCamp Assistant, and partition 100gb for Windows XP Pro. Like most, I didn’t read the requirements, and it bit me in the butt. I tried to do an install from an Upgrade disk. In the install process, it asks me to prove that I qualify for the upgrade by entering the qualifying installer media. Unfortunately, there’s no way to eject the CD to put in the other one during the install process.

To eject a “stuck” CD/DVD, restart your Mac, holding down the mouse button until the disk ejects

I ended up deciding that the likelihood that I’d need to actually boot into Windows rather than just use VMware on my MacBook was going to be impossibly small, and ditched my BootCamp partition by just running the assistant again.

I seem to be having a bit of trouble getting ColdFusion 8 running. I got through the installer and replaced the Apache connector with the 64-bit version, but I get a 500 Internal Server Error when I try to go to the administrator. More on that when I figure out the problem.

I’ve so far been able to install everything with ease, and I’ll skip most programs that I’m using (they’re cross-platform, so nothing special), but I will do separate reviews for some apps that I evaluate to replace essential Windows-only software, such as TortoiseSVN.