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!).
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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.
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.
It’s pretty awesome, and it looks great too :)
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.
http://www.jedit.org/
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.
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!
/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.
And a little editor called xPad which looks promising for the future:
http://www.maniacalrage.com/xpad/
And props to the previously mentioned CSSEdit.
http://www.skti.org/skEdit_features.php
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/
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.
www.malcolmadams.com/itunes/scripts/scripts08.shtml
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. ;)