moonlee.org

So last week CG tells me that he’s decided to make the jump to the Mac as a development platform from Windows after a lengthy period of soul searching. I think that’s pretty cool – the Mac is a wonderful development environment for so many reasons. And it has that magic combination of Unix and an elegant GUI to appeal to both developers from both the Windows and Linux camps. While obviously not all the same development environments are available across platforms, there are quite a few packages on the Mac that have made my life much better:

• Locomotive: A self-contained ROR container, with packages for various versions of Rails that lets you start developing right away. Just drag and drop into your Applications folder. Provides ruby, rails, some choice gems and dependent libraries so you don’t have to install/compile them yourself.
• MAMP: Basically the same thing for PHP4/5, but goes a step further and gives you a full stack with MySQL and Apache as well. This is nice because getting Tiger’s stock PHP4 install to play nice with the MySQL binary install is kind of a pain.
• TextMate: A very wonderful and powerful text editor, with bindings and macros for more languages than you can shake a stick at.

There are of course many more tools out there – stuff that I use the shell for, but you could substitute with GUI applications, like FTP clients and the like. If you have any personal favorites, definitely let me know – I’m always on the look out for better tools.