Apple The "I got a mac, and I don't know how to do things" thread.

So, I finally fell to the call of Steve Jobs and his Booms and bought a macbook.

Mainly for doing the occasional bit of freelance on.

Does anyone else do the web design thing on a mac? I've got Photoshop on the way, but I'm reluctant to use Dreamweaver. I really dislike the WYSIWYG view, it's buggy and slows things down having to constantly refresh it even if it's not visible! But I do find auto complete really handy.

So, a step up from Notepad (or whatever it is on a mac) but far more slimline than Dreamweaver.

Any suggestions?

 

you can try SciTE which i use on my windows machine, but am sure that there is a mac version about for it

 

Textmate and BBedit I prefer Textmate.

 

Text mate looks good. I'll give that a try out tonight. Cheers

 

textmate is the daddy, i work exclusively in that

xcode isn't bad either actually

 

textmate and debug with FireFox and Firebug... that's what i've seen running in screencasts a lot.

 

textmate, or Dreamweaver code mode (you can set dreamweaver to show the code only (with color coding), and work with that).

 

Yea, but it's a really heavy program to just run in code view. Textmate is great though. I'm having trouble with working out what it can really do though. I get the feeling I'm not using it properly. That said, I have no idea how I even installed it, it just downloaded and then kinda worked... Macs are confusing for people used to doing things in a complicated long-winded way on Windows.

Oh, actually that reminds me. Does anyone know of a decent alternative to Grabit? (not the screenshot program, that's snaggit)

 

If you just downloaded textmate and it somehow launched, you're probably running it out of the disk image (.dmg) you downloaded. Drag it from the disk image into your Apps folder where it belongs (then unmount and chuck the .dmg in the trash can)

To use textmate properly it's all about the macros and bundles, check those out under the bundles menu That should start you on your way

 

textmate is so fricking awesome. the only time i have ever been remotely tempted to buy a mac was after using it on a friends machine.

 

Textmate > all for writing code. CSSEdit is also worth owning. All I ever use, and 98% of my work is done in textmate. I have enough snippets that I've made so that it practically writes my code for me. The one thing that I don't especially care for in Textmate is its autocomplete system (it doesn't have the little tabbed-out dropdown menu like every other IDE on the planet does) but after getting to know how powerful it is for everything else, that's only a very minor niggle.

I wouldn't hesitate to call it the best text editor on the planet, bar none. And I would have said that a year ago, back when I was only using about 2% of its functionality. I've got a couple of useful snippets on my blog that might set you in the right direction for making your own snippets/bundles if you go that route (auto get-set pairs for php classes, automatic div comment labels for html, etc.

I own a license to Coda, but don't use it much anymore. The makers of CSSEdit are making a new product called Espresso that looks to sort of combine Textmate and CSSEdit and target Coda, but I've played with the beta and it's very much a beta. I also have inside information about the next version of Coda as I'm on their beta list as well, but it sounds like the next release isn't far off so I won't spoil anything.

Anyways, re:grabit - the screencasting thing? I use Screenflow, which is awesome. For normal screenshots, I just use the built-in system-wide hotkeys for grab, which default to Cmd+Shift+4 to save a selection to the desktop as a png, and if you hit space while you have the crosshairs then it turns into an app grabber. If you use 3 instead of 4 in either case then it copies it direct to the clipboard.

 

Dreamweaver is the only one I've found that doesn't suck.

 

textmate and cssedit, or coda. best evar

 

Anyone know if you can set certain applications to close when you click close. For example, I'm happy keeping firefox running, but I'd rather photoshop didn't.

Also, does anyone know if I will have a problem using a NAS drive with a mac and a PC, and does anyone have a suggestion for a good NAS drive.

 

http://www.e-texteditor.com/

will: No problems sharing a NAS drive between a mac and a pc.

 

The best thing to do (especially on a notebook) is to just use the keyboard to close apps. Cmd+Q will fully close any app. One of my favorite things about OS X is the ability to do almost everything via keyboard shortcuts

Have you actually ever used E? It is, or at least was, the buggiest piece of **** I've ever come across. I hope it has got a lot better than it was a year ago. I suppose it was still beta then, though.

 

hold control, option, command and 8 to invert the screen, then everything is inverted. Neat trick, fun to use on friends as they get very confused and can never find out how to fix it... Same command brings it back to normal too

 

Meh, TextMate has nothing on Emacs.

 

Depends to you want to edit text, or replace everything else on your system

 

Oh do tell me what text editing features TextMate has that are better than Emacs’s. And I hope you do realise that all the Emacs modules aren’t compulsory? If you don’t want them don’t install them.