Silicon Chisel

Coda

Espresso

Mac Dev Tools Worth Having

For a lot of people, the Mac is seen as the PC for a “creative person”. Very “artsy.” Now, I’ve spent years (decades) developing code on Sun workstations, DEC equipment, and PC’s – the Mac, and the tools that are available on it beat all that stuff by a wide margin.

For starters, Mac OS X is itself a Linux environment. So no more shoe-horning a WAMP environment onto a PC. It’s not needed (although I do use MAMP for the Mac because Apple chose not to install some of the standard PHP extensions as standard, but for most developers this may not be needed).

But what IDE does one run? Sure, you can install the ever-present Eclipse platform. Which is capable of pretty much anything and everything if you locate/install/configure/incant the right stuff. For me, Eclipse was just too much work to get running, too slow, and too idiosynchratic to use on a daily basis.

Thus enters Coda, by Panic. Coda combines a solid code editor, a rock-solid FTP client, a terminal, a CSS editor, Subversion, and site management in one package. If you code in Rails or work with CMS-based sites, the inclusion of a SSH terminal which remembers passwords is a life saver. No more neededing to reach for Terminal or iTerm when you need to launch mongrel or change some folder protection – just open a tab, hit the button and you’re in.

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Desktop Applications, Development Tools, Macintosh ide, Macintosh, php, ruby on rails, subversion

A question was recently posted on Linked In about the future of Social Networks. And not a week goes by when someone doesn’t ask me about building on of these behemoths. It’s hip, it’s trendy, and “everyone uses FaceBook or MySpace.” Lets ignore the business aspects of this for a moment – which drives much of the interest, anyway – and look at where this whole deal is heading.

When one steps back and looks at Facebook and MySpace, and view it as a “network” one can indeed see that it is a vast set of connections from one person to another, or many others. It is a network much like the streets of a city … it provides the means to get something from one place to another; or like a phone book … you can look up anyone you may want to find and contact them.

This is basically a “passive” network. When you really boil these services down, they are a place to put “stuff” where other people can find it, and a place to find other people’s “stuff.” Anyone who uses these still needs a phone, email, IM, TXT-messages, RSS readers, a Twitter client, and so on. So, the actual real-time networking between people is actually carried out outside of the social networking sites.

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Articles social-networks, Web 2.0

Most of my daylight hours are spent as CTO/lead-coder/graphics-monkey of a start-up I’ve been with for a couple of years: Dialed In. This is a Ruby On Rails application and that means we hit the usual problem with Rails of finding a good hosting service. There aren’t a whole lot of top-shelf options in this area yet and, back when we started, there were even fewer. At that time Engine Yard (“EY”) had a waiting list of a week or more to get service and we didn’t have the time, so we went with another provider who was technically as good, but could fulfill our server needs more or less same-day.

Now fast-forward a couple of years. Our provider starts to have some performance issues, one of which ends up costing us half a week of down-time to move our server image to a new physical server. Support starts to get slow and, while responsive, we get the impression that they’d rather we figure stuff out on our own. They have great technology and, if we were a large company with a full IT staff, it’d be great fun to play with.

But we’re not. We’re a small outfit where everyone does 3 or 4 or 20 jobs and messing around with complex server configurations is simply not good for business. Every hour one of our developers spends trying to configure the server is an hour they’re not spending writing code.

So we just recently moved the whole deal over to Engine Yard. In a word, I was astounded by the reception we received. For starters, their slice hosting comes with free accounts on GitHub (Git hosting), Beanstalk (SVN hosting), Lighthouse (ticket/project-management system), and New Relic (application analytics). So basically all the services we needed, or were paying for elsewhere, were now included in our basic hosting fees. Email is hosted on MailTrust – which works pretty well, even though it’s based on a Microsoft platform. But using MailTrust we can suddenly send email to people on AOL, so that’s a good thing.

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Development Tools ruby on rails

The new Google Chrome browser is a really nice piece of technology. Google has an uncanny knack for building applications which are fast, light, and smart. The search/address field is a very well done. Type whatever you want in there and get a list of likely matches. If nothing fits, hit return and go search for it. When you start using it, you wonder why this wasn’t the way it was at first.

Being able to turn any tab into a launchable desktop application is also great. It means I can now retire Prism from my Windows machine as Chrome does a better job – especially on GMail, Google Docs, and so on – go figure.

The minimalist interface gets in the way in some cases – like trying to figure out how to manage bookmarks. And if you’re used to the features you can end up with in Firefox once you load up all your add-ons, Chrome may be a downer. Because it does what it does – it does it fast and reliably, but that’s all it does.

But that isn’t bad. Use Firefox when you need your add-ons for downloading video or inserting BB-codes into message boards. Use Chrome for your web applications where you want them launched fast and you don’t need anything else getting in the way.

The one huge, huge problem with Chrome … it’s Windows only. Of course, this makes sense given the market share of That Platform. But still. The ‘Net runs on Linux and most of the best design work is done on the Mac. The opinion-makers don’t like on Windows 24×7. I’m sure Google will correct this.

In summary, Chrome is the ideal browser for accessing web-based applications (version control, project management, email, billing systems, and so on). It’s worth a shot and, while it may not take market share away from Internet Explorer, every user who can be lured away from it can be considered a “win” for web designers.

Desktop Applications chrome, google, templates, wordpress

If you’re doing code development on a Mac, especially if you’re bouncing onto your web server a lot, there are a lot of little commands and passwords that you need to keep track of. SSH passwords, SVN passwords and accounts, commands for SVN, Rails, Apache, mysql, etc. This is on top of the snippets of text for running the Mac itself and all the various signatures, quotations, recipes, contact information and other endless pieces of data you not only need to store, but be able to quickly retrieve but paste quickly into a browser, email, or shell window.

Enter “ShoveBox“, a great little menubar utility which keeps all this stuff close at hand. There are a lot of clipboard managers, but ShoveBox’s “Organize” window makes the difference. It allows all the clipping to be organized and colorized any way you like. This makes it real easy to track down that Subversion command for creating a branch you only use once or twice in six months – and then just drag-paste it into your terminal window.
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Desktop Applications, Macintosh clipboard