Chris Meller

It’s been just over a week now that I’ve been using my beloved PowerBook. Just today I received my 2gb of RAM from NewEgg and got it installed while at work. This thing was kick ass with the stock 512mb, but now that it’s got more than my main / gaming desktop at home (1gb) I’m insanely happy.

One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed about the Mac community as a whole is the software. No no, not the design aspects, the pricing aspects. On the PC, there are generally a few large (and expensive) packages that most people use for their daily tasks (Outlook for email, Zend and NuSphere for PHP development, Visual Studio for programming, etc.). OS X, on the other hand, has hundreds of little (and cheap) applications that suit various different styles of use and personal preference.

For example, I tried 4 different applications before I decided which one I wanted to use for my web development.

BBEditBBEdit was a default. I’ve heard so many great things about it and was so sorely disappointed… Anyone mind telling me what BBEdit offers me that a command line editor wouldn’t? It just seemed so Windows 3.1…

skEditskEdit was a very promising app. In fact, for a while it was my choice. Unfortunately, I find it’s “Sites” concept to be a little clunky. It’s a poor implementation of the seperate “Projects” idea most similar programs operate under. The friendly, familiar code completion implementation apparently also doesn’t support PHP, so it was negated in my testing.

PHP StudioPHP Studio claimed to be exactly what I was looking for: a kickass PHP editor with that Mac OS X design goodness. Unfortunately, there didn’t appear to be any way to create a “Project”, even a poorly implemented way. Since that’s one of the biggest pieces for me (self-contained groups of files that are handled and managed as a group), it was cut out rather quickly. The toolbar also seemed sparce and poorly pouplated. Why would I want to compile a PHP script? That really doesn’t make any sense to me, but we’ll move along…

TextMateI have to say, TextMate has been my favorite. It’s got Projects, looks great, is simple to use, and has some fairly good syntax highlighting. One of the more unique features in my experience was the menu that allowed quick navigation between functions. Since I’ve been testing applications while developing WordPress plugins (which are entirely function-based), this has been a godsend for my sanity.

I’ve still got about 20 days left on my TextMate trial, but as of now I’m planning on spending the $45-ish (after the conversion to USD) for a registration. If anyone has a better solution, I’d be more than happy to try out some other programs, but there’s not a whole lot more I could ask for (other than code completion).

There will, of course, be more commentary to come in the future, as I continue to get settled in… As expected, I’ve got my own gripes about the functionality of several apps.