This weekend I've been working on writing a compiler, playing around with a lot of PDFs, putting together a PowerPoint presentation along with the usual email and IMing and such. So how's it been on the Mac?
The compiler I'm working on leverages lex/flex/yacc/bison and thus it's very helpful to have the Unix base to OS X along with the entire developer tools package installed. It wouldn't be hard to install cygwin on XP to accomplish the same, but the fact that it's just there waiting for me is nice on so many levels. Now if OS X could write some of the compiler for me then I'd be switching in an instant.
I'm also working on a Java project, but since I haven't had time to play around with Xcode I've been using Netbeans. First and foremost, Netbeans is a horrible application, although a fairly nice IDE. Let me explain; Netbeans crashes a lot and it's the only application I've ever seen crash with an "array index out of bounds" exception; when it happened to me (under XP) I was shocked. I thought only my poorly written programs gave those errors :) Netbeans under OS X is basically just like Netbeans under Linux and XP, which is useful for one reason alone: it makes me appreciate the OS X interface that much more. It's like being able to run an application that abides by Windows' rules for how applications should behave, except within the OS X environment.
Why am I not using Xcode? For those of you that don't know, Xcode is a free development environment that Apple offers for OS X. It seems to be pretty nice, but for the development I'm doing all I need to do is compile java to run at the command prompt; no GUIs, no fanciness, no nothing. I'm sure if I toyed with Xcode enough I could figure it out, but I didn't know if anyone reading had any experience with doing just that? Note that writing in Xcode and then opening up Terminal to run javac and java isn't what I had in mind :) I want to be able to compile/run command prompt apps from within Xcode. Possible?
I've talked about Apple's PDF viewer in the past (or at least I think I have), it's called Preview and it's what keeps my machine Acrobat-free. Preview handles much more than just reading PDFs, it is also the default viewer for images. It handles image viewing just fine, but I want to focus on its PDF viewing capabilities. Apple is very proud to talk about Preview's speed when loading and navigating PDFs; in my experience it seems a bit more responsive than Acrobat but on the PDFs that Acrobat chugs on, Preview does as well. Preview also has a little drawer that will slide out from the right side of the PDF that will give you one click access to any page of the document - definitely something that Acrobat reader lacks. I originally had a complaint about Preview's handling of 2-slide-per-page PDFs, but then I discovered the beauty that is the Zoom button in OS X.
I mentioned in a blog before that there's no Maximize button in OS X, which is one of the first things I remember hating the first time I used OS X way back when. As a Windows user, we're used to maximizing but it's a habit that you have to break when using OS X; and trust me, it's not a bad thing. OS X has the usual control objects at the top of every window, except they are on the left side of the window instead of the right (don't ask why). They appear in this order - close, minimize and zoom. Close and Minimize do the same thing they do in Windows, but Zoom is the interesting one.
Zoom basically extends the window horizontally and vertically to fit the content that is being displayed in a window. I know that as a Windows user I was forever resizing my IE windows to get them to be the perfect size to display web pages (AnandTech in particular) whenever I'd setup a new computer. With OS X, you just hit the Zoom button and the window magically (ok it's not magic) resizes itself to fit the web page. This works perfectly for PDFs and other documents as well; in the case of documents (such as a PDF) it will even magnify the text a bit.
The only thing OS X's Zoom feature is missing is, you guessed it, a default keyboard shortcut (unless there is one and I continue to be Macoblivious). Any recommendations for a good default otherwise?
For my presentation that I was working on this weekend I had to do some Photoshop work, and I'm definitely beginning to appreciate Photoshop under OS X. OS X has this wonderful ability to allow you to drag highlighted text or pictures from any application, from any window, to virtually any other application/window. The OS is also fairly smart about how it handles dragging images; if I drag an image into a text field, it will paste a link to the image. I read a lot of car forums and my favorite forum happens to only allow you to view images if you're registered and logged in. This is a problem for my friends that I send links to because they aren't as crazy as I am but do enjoy the pictures. You can, however, view the URL to the image just fine if you are not logged in, but normally that's a process that requires me to right click on the image, view information about it, copy the URL and paste it into an IM window. With OS X, I simply drag the image to my IM window and it automatically pastes the URL.
My only complaint (which others will definitely argue with me on) is that when I drag the image into Adium, it does not shift focus to the Adium window - so I still have to click on the window to send the IM. It's all a part of Apple's non-intrusive OS behavior; for example, hitting enter on a folder won't open it, it will just allow you to rename it. You have to hit Command-O (Apple-O) to actually open the folder (or the file), which is useful in that I've never accidentally launched a program by hitting enter when I didn't mean to on a document, but it's also annoying in some cases.
The drag and drop capabilities that are spread all over the OS do come in hand with Photoshop. What I do miss however are the keyboard shortcuts from the Windows version of Photoshop, I liked being able to hit a couple of keys and have the image resize dialog pop up. I haven't defined the key combinations for Photoshop yet but I'm sure I will when I've got a free minute.
For the first time since I downloaded Adium I updated the binary to the latest version, unfortunately I've been having a ton of problems with it. Now I understand that it's an alpha build so I'm not complaining, I just wish I hadn't gotten rid of my February 9th build of the thing - it was just so much more stable than what I'm using now. I looked through the Adium forums and most people don't seem to be having any stability problems, but I swear the latest builds have been crashing like crazy. And if someone tries to send me a file, whoaboy that does a number on me being able to receive IMs :)
The one thing I can't get used to is using iCal, Apple's Calendar application. I think I do prefer the Outlook style of having the calendar integrated into the mail application. I just never seem to bring myself to keep iCal open, well except for now because I had to look up a date but that's a rare exception :) It is the one thing that still doesn't feel comfortable to me, although I do like the interface of iCal very much. Am I just strange? Does everyone else love this application to death? You don't have to be nice.
I complained about not having FTP upload capability within the GUI, but even with Transmit 2 installed I'm finding myself using a Terminal window (command prompt) to ftp. The ability to ssh from Terminal is also very nice, oh how I wish the XP command prompt had that functionality natively.
I made this post because someone commented that they needed more reading material. I know how frustrating it can be to feel like you've read every last thing on the 'net, so I hope you enjoyed it :)
The compiler I'm working on leverages lex/flex/yacc/bison and thus it's very helpful to have the Unix base to OS X along with the entire developer tools package installed. It wouldn't be hard to install cygwin on XP to accomplish the same, but the fact that it's just there waiting for me is nice on so many levels. Now if OS X could write some of the compiler for me then I'd be switching in an instant.
I'm also working on a Java project, but since I haven't had time to play around with Xcode I've been using Netbeans. First and foremost, Netbeans is a horrible application, although a fairly nice IDE. Let me explain; Netbeans crashes a lot and it's the only application I've ever seen crash with an "array index out of bounds" exception; when it happened to me (under XP) I was shocked. I thought only my poorly written programs gave those errors :) Netbeans under OS X is basically just like Netbeans under Linux and XP, which is useful for one reason alone: it makes me appreciate the OS X interface that much more. It's like being able to run an application that abides by Windows' rules for how applications should behave, except within the OS X environment.
Why am I not using Xcode? For those of you that don't know, Xcode is a free development environment that Apple offers for OS X. It seems to be pretty nice, but for the development I'm doing all I need to do is compile java to run at the command prompt; no GUIs, no fanciness, no nothing. I'm sure if I toyed with Xcode enough I could figure it out, but I didn't know if anyone reading had any experience with doing just that? Note that writing in Xcode and then opening up Terminal to run javac and java isn't what I had in mind :) I want to be able to compile/run command prompt apps from within Xcode. Possible?
I've talked about Apple's PDF viewer in the past (or at least I think I have), it's called Preview and it's what keeps my machine Acrobat-free. Preview handles much more than just reading PDFs, it is also the default viewer for images. It handles image viewing just fine, but I want to focus on its PDF viewing capabilities. Apple is very proud to talk about Preview's speed when loading and navigating PDFs; in my experience it seems a bit more responsive than Acrobat but on the PDFs that Acrobat chugs on, Preview does as well. Preview also has a little drawer that will slide out from the right side of the PDF that will give you one click access to any page of the document - definitely something that Acrobat reader lacks. I originally had a complaint about Preview's handling of 2-slide-per-page PDFs, but then I discovered the beauty that is the Zoom button in OS X.
I mentioned in a blog before that there's no Maximize button in OS X, which is one of the first things I remember hating the first time I used OS X way back when. As a Windows user, we're used to maximizing but it's a habit that you have to break when using OS X; and trust me, it's not a bad thing. OS X has the usual control objects at the top of every window, except they are on the left side of the window instead of the right (don't ask why). They appear in this order - close, minimize and zoom. Close and Minimize do the same thing they do in Windows, but Zoom is the interesting one.
Zoom basically extends the window horizontally and vertically to fit the content that is being displayed in a window. I know that as a Windows user I was forever resizing my IE windows to get them to be the perfect size to display web pages (AnandTech in particular) whenever I'd setup a new computer. With OS X, you just hit the Zoom button and the window magically (ok it's not magic) resizes itself to fit the web page. This works perfectly for PDFs and other documents as well; in the case of documents (such as a PDF) it will even magnify the text a bit.
The only thing OS X's Zoom feature is missing is, you guessed it, a default keyboard shortcut (unless there is one and I continue to be Macoblivious). Any recommendations for a good default otherwise?
For my presentation that I was working on this weekend I had to do some Photoshop work, and I'm definitely beginning to appreciate Photoshop under OS X. OS X has this wonderful ability to allow you to drag highlighted text or pictures from any application, from any window, to virtually any other application/window. The OS is also fairly smart about how it handles dragging images; if I drag an image into a text field, it will paste a link to the image. I read a lot of car forums and my favorite forum happens to only allow you to view images if you're registered and logged in. This is a problem for my friends that I send links to because they aren't as crazy as I am but do enjoy the pictures. You can, however, view the URL to the image just fine if you are not logged in, but normally that's a process that requires me to right click on the image, view information about it, copy the URL and paste it into an IM window. With OS X, I simply drag the image to my IM window and it automatically pastes the URL.
My only complaint (which others will definitely argue with me on) is that when I drag the image into Adium, it does not shift focus to the Adium window - so I still have to click on the window to send the IM. It's all a part of Apple's non-intrusive OS behavior; for example, hitting enter on a folder won't open it, it will just allow you to rename it. You have to hit Command-O (Apple-O) to actually open the folder (or the file), which is useful in that I've never accidentally launched a program by hitting enter when I didn't mean to on a document, but it's also annoying in some cases.
The drag and drop capabilities that are spread all over the OS do come in hand with Photoshop. What I do miss however are the keyboard shortcuts from the Windows version of Photoshop, I liked being able to hit a couple of keys and have the image resize dialog pop up. I haven't defined the key combinations for Photoshop yet but I'm sure I will when I've got a free minute.
For the first time since I downloaded Adium I updated the binary to the latest version, unfortunately I've been having a ton of problems with it. Now I understand that it's an alpha build so I'm not complaining, I just wish I hadn't gotten rid of my February 9th build of the thing - it was just so much more stable than what I'm using now. I looked through the Adium forums and most people don't seem to be having any stability problems, but I swear the latest builds have been crashing like crazy. And if someone tries to send me a file, whoaboy that does a number on me being able to receive IMs :)
The one thing I can't get used to is using iCal, Apple's Calendar application. I think I do prefer the Outlook style of having the calendar integrated into the mail application. I just never seem to bring myself to keep iCal open, well except for now because I had to look up a date but that's a rare exception :) It is the one thing that still doesn't feel comfortable to me, although I do like the interface of iCal very much. Am I just strange? Does everyone else love this application to death? You don't have to be nice.
I complained about not having FTP upload capability within the GUI, but even with Transmit 2 installed I'm finding myself using a Terminal window (command prompt) to ftp. The ability to ssh from Terminal is also very nice, oh how I wish the XP command prompt had that functionality natively.
I made this post because someone commented that they needed more reading material. I know how frustrating it can be to feel like you've read every last thing on the 'net, so I hope you enjoyed it :)
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
47 Comments
View All Comments
Anonymous - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
xCode:"XCode -> File -> New Project -> Java Tool"
yeah, that sets up a basic java project. as with all projects, when xcode runs the exe it opens a console that will act as the stdin/stdout if the program uses those. but because i never bothered to learn how to really control gcc from xcode if im working on something that needs special gcc flags then i just use xcode for the 'code sense' (code completion, symbol indexing etc) and run gcc from the command line (usually with a makefile)
Zoom:
i set it to control command z. but most of the stuff i work with doesn't really have a set size so the 'fit to content' often wouldn't make the content the size i want. so i dont use it that often.
Aside: i have pretty much everything i use regularly set up to obey the way ive divided up my (one, sigh...) screen. main application like web browsers, xcode, mail, ical etc take up the left ~2/3 while background windows (itunes, ichat, downloads etc) take up the rest. ive even set my desktop to 16x16 icons with text on the right, so they take up the right 1/3 (two columns of files max). BTW, how do you deal with the menu bar being only on the main screen? oh, thats right. keyboard short cuts :) - does anyone know of a way to get the menues to appear on both screens?
ical:
i only use it for the public calendars that ive subscribed to. i tried using it for reminders of important stuff, but i find that its unreliable (in that i might forget that i need ical open and shut down the computer) but the fact that it can be used to do stuff like text message a cell phone or IM me or pretty much do anything osascripting can do sounds neat. GUI cron!
bored:
have you tried ichat? if not then a good use of it (since you dont use AIM) could be to hang out in some chat room (tho chat rooms dont support many nice things about ichat) and then people can pop in a talk about these blogs (we wont expect you to actively participate 24/7:) that'd be great.
sometime in the future (when the powerbook is at dual 2GHz:) you should try to get a powerbook for testing so you can check out OS X's mobile features.
Felix_the_Mac - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
Re starting applications.
As you say you cant start an application by pressing enter. I remeber reading once that this was because renaming was considered to be less distructive that running and the OS developers wanted to make the more destructive operation harder.
Or something :-).
However, in additon to Apple+O which is pretty horrible you can use apple+ Down.
This is much nicer when you are using the arrow keys to walk through the multi column view.
Thanks for doing this whole Mac experiment.
(I guess we wouldnt be so pleased if you panned it!)
Diggory Laycock - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
You can execute shell commands from within XCode (if it's inherited the feature from ProjectBuilder) - see here:http://cocoadev.com/index.pl?ProjectBuilderShell
Also You could use AppleScript to compile/execute the code - see my SubEthaEdit JavaC applescript: http://monkeyfood.com/software/subethaeditjavacomp...
egarc - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
Anand. During this Mac experiment, do you feel more secure online since you don't have to worry about spyware, adware, viruses, worms or whatever else the hackers come up with? Will you comment on your feelings regarding security on the Mac as compared to XP? Please comment on the Software Update application as compared to browser based updates with XP.Thanks.
egarc - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
I've been a diehard Mac user since 1986 and I don't like iCal for some reason. I prefer an application like Outlook for the simple reason that all your data is in the same place and you don't have to open and close so many windows to access it. I hope Apple gives us a real PIM.julien - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
You really should try eclipse for java programming, even if you don't need any of its advanced features.jeffosx - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
Anand, here is some shortcuts you may not have seen??http://www.uark.edu/compserv/softsys/macintosh/mac...
As for preview I think its one of the best apps in OSX. I put it in the finder windows so I can drag files to it easily. If you drag a group of images onto it or select open with Preview. They are all put on their own page and what I found neat is that the pages are drag and drop aware so I can drag a crap image to the trash or to a doc. It also views .psd . You can print a file to pdf and then export it to an image format with options like target size etc. This is a real time saver for me.
One thing I would like to know is how right click centric are you now? After learning the keyboard modifiers I find alot of the right click stuff much slower...
Dennis Travis - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
Anand, I also like you just went over to OSX. Your Blog is helping a lot with all your comments and the others here too. It's pretty easy for me as I know Mac basics from the older Mac OS's, but have learned so much just reading your blog!I find ICal to be quite nice so far. Never much cared for Outlook for some reason. Maybe that is why I like Ical so much.
On the Chat client, I also like you, LOVE Trillian. Bought it a long time ago now. At the advice of users here in your Mac Blog I tried Proteus and love it so far. Seems to do all Trillian does and works great with all Chat servers like MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ ETC. Not a problem so far. I like it so much in fact I am thinking of paying for it. It to me is the perfect replacement under OSX for Trillian users. You might as others here have suggested try it! You might just like it!!
If anyone figures out a Keyboard Shortcut for Zooming the open window please post it. The one that makes the text larger and smaller comes in very handy but the one Anand is looking for also would be nice! Anyone??
noliv - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
I have a little /!\ WARNING /!\, several friends have lost some files after switching to the Mac.If you replace a folder named "A" by another folder named "A". Your OS ask "Replace?", you click "Yes".... BUT, the Windows user expect the OS to mix the contents of the old folder "A" and the new folder "A". Mac OS will erase the old folder "A" and all its content, and you will only get your new folder "A"...
Many people are losing files that way!
BTW, I don't use iCal.
RadRafe - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
Actually, sheer4, Anand is asking for a shortcut for the Zoom widget, not the Universal Access zooming function.Granted, that zooming is really cool; I'm told Windows has nothing near as good. I use it all the time. It's great for when I'm farther from the screen. Anand, if you haven't already, try out the zoom options in Universal Access in System Preferences. You'll be impressed.