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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

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PowerBook

13 January 2004

I ordered a PowerBook last night. Woohoo! I went for the 15 inch G4 1.25, SuperDuperDrive and the faster hard disc. Fingers crossed it should be here in about 10 days. I configured the memory to a single 512, and ordered an additional 512 from Crucial. Understandably, I’m excited. Now I’ve read loads and loads online about the various essential tools I need, switchers guides etc, but there’s a couple of things I need to sort out.

It looks like BBEdit is the web development tool of choice, and offers the XHTML, CSS, PHP4 and XML support that I need. It also has CVS support, which is attractive. However, are there other choices out there that are as good? How about dedicated CSS editors for OS X- is there anything specific I should look at?

The other thing to consider is my iPod, which is current Windows formatted. I’m sure there’s no problem reformatting it to mac, but I need to work out how to then get the music back on it. I don’t want to go through the whole CD reloading thing (I’d rather leave it attached to my Windows box if it comes to that!).

- Drew McLellan

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  1. § Seb: If you’re happy coding manually, you really can’t go wrong with BBEdit - it’s an outstanding text editor. And I always find it easier to edit CSS by hand anyway...

    As for the iPod, you could either copy all the original MP3 files across to the PowerBook, or you could get a utility such as iPod Access which will extract all the tracks off your iPod.
  2. § Jesse: You ordered the same one I have ;) I just got an extra battery.. and don’t forget your applecare. It may be an added ’tax’ but if your latch goes in 13 months you will be happy you did.

    It took 36 days for mine to come in but I ordered when they were redoing the screen on the 15inch albook (white patches). There was a shortage of 5400rpm drives as well.. not sure if that is still an issue. I have had it for a month and a half now and no problems other than yesterday my folder icons all changed to MS office icons.. odd.

    But ya.. as far as CSS goes, BBedit is probably your best bet. I have been using DW MX 2004 mainly as a text editor for some time though (no panels) - I have to support a lot of DW MX users. I gave StyleMaster a try.. its a little bulky but not bad. Not sure about anything else. I have been looking for a while and always come back to BBedit.
  3. § Clint Ecker: I used to edit all my CSS by hand until I found CSSEdit: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19429

    It’s pretty awesome, and it looks great too :)
  4. § paulpod: Congrats.

    For web development, yeah bbedit is the bomb. I use dreamweaver mx too when i’m feeling lazy.

    A useful app for moving mp3’s and iPods around is this:

    http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/win/29657

    its windows and mac, and seems to do the trick nicely.
  5. § Steve Kirks: An alternative to Dreamweaver would be PageSpinner. It’s very solid and has hooks to BBEdit and AppleScript.
  6. § goldbug: I’m too cheap to buy BBEdit... so I just use JEdit instead :)
    http://www.jedit.org/
  7. § Bob: I’ve got my eye on the same model... hopefully I’ll be able to order it at the end of the week (depends on what our yearly bonuses look like... if we even get them...)

    Until the boss made me switch to a Windoze box, I used BBEdit for all my text-editing chores. But then again, I was using DW3 for my design work, which I would then tweak in BBEdit. I’m looking forward to doing all my development work solely in BBEdit - I’ve missed it like an old friend.
  8. § brent: Looks like Clint stoled my thunder about CSSEdit. (http://www.macrabbit.com/cssedit/) I’ve been using it since May and love it. It has a great extended preview option that uses Apple’s WebCore Engine to have you an instant preview which you don’t even have to reload to see your changes. Version 1.5 is very stable.

    For Coding/Text editing I use SubEthaEdit. (http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/) It’s great cause I can share the documents with other Macs and we can all edit on the same document at the same time. It then highlights what parts others are editing. On top of that, it does syntax highlighting for a hole host of languages.

    As for the iPod, i’m not lucky enough to have one yet :(. Hope you like the new machine. I have the last model of the TiBook and I love it!
  9. § Ethan: I didn’t have too much luck with some of the GUIs for getting music off of my iPod; I just ended up firing up a terminal and navigating to /Volumes/[Your iPod’s name]/iPod_Control/Music/, and copying the music to my hard drive.

    Clumsy as hell, I suppose — but that’s me.
  10. § Shawn: On the text editor front, there is also the small but powerful (and Rendezvous-ready SubEthaEdit from http://www.codingmonkeys.de

    And a little editor called xPad which looks promising for the future:
    http://www.maniacalrage.com/xpad/

    And props to the previously mentioned CSSEdit.
  11. § Dysfunksional.Monkey: I’ve heard of a program called something like scribe for the mac. The reviews I’ve heard are very good, although I think you’ll have to shell out some cash (about $10 i think). I’ll have a nosey round and mail you with what I can find...
  12. § Dysfunksional.Monkey: Ah... found it: SkEdit.
    http://www.skti.org/skEdit_features.php
  13. § FactoryJoe: Yeah, Brent stoled my thunder too... I was going to recommend both CSSEdit and SubEthaEdit.

    One app you might not have considered right away and which I found marginally useful when I was migrating from Dreamweaver MX to SubEthaEdit is XCode—free from Apple as part of the XCode Tools. You can open multiple docs in the same window and it color-codes PHP and HTML text pretty well. It’s got some quirkiness, but I’d love to see a better program than I write some extension for XCode that would be useful for web developers like us... one of the biggest advantages that I’ve found with XCode is that it’s so damn fast!

    http://developer.apple.com/tools/xcode/
  14. § Justin Blanton: Excellent Drew! I think you’re going to love the Apple. I had to find a solution to the same iPod problem when I moved to a TiBook (I have an AlBook now). Check out this post from last May (scroll down to the iPod part)—it might help you.

    In that same post you’ll also find that I talk about moving mail from Outlook (and some Linux clients) to Mail.app. Disregard what I say in that post—I’ve just moved ALL of my saved mail to Mail.app and put up a post about it a few days ago—you might find it helpful if you are looking to do the same thing.
  15. § travis: You can also use applescript to copy the songs from your iPod...

    www.malcolmadams.com/itunes/scripts/scripts08.shtml
  16. § Tom: *drools*
  17. § Brandon: If I remember correctly, you oculd leave your iPod formatted for windows - fat32 - and it will still work with your PowerBook. Macs can read and write fat32 but widows can’t read or write hfs. So, if you ever want to go back to a windows box (pah!) or connect it to your work pc or someone else’s then you still have that option.

    Just check out any of the various ipod group sites for reviews on any product that allows you to copy music from iPod back into iTunes and thus your hard drive. Ain’t too hard. Done it once or twice - gonna have to do it again with the iBook on its way.

    Just don’t steal music. ;)
  18. § gist: check out acme.com or acmemade.com (i forget which it is) for their screen cover. i’m rockin’ the exact same set up (crucial 512 and all) in my PB15 lappy and though they made the screen more concave to reduce finger oils getting on the screen, it still happens. the cover for the 15 pb is about 20 dollars i think and it’s pretty worth it. it’s all soft and nice and it’ll keep your screen nice and young. enjoy and have fun with panther, it’ll blow your mind.

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Caburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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