A few days ago, I broke down and committed blasphemy: I installed Boot Camp and Windows XP on my MacBook Pro. I was originally going to wait until OSX 10.5 / Leopard comes out, but since I am planning to do a fresh install with Leopard anyway, I figured I’d give Boot Camp a shot to see if I like it, and so I can wipe it out when I install Leopard in case I don’t....
Earlier this month, version 1.5 of the OSX Camino browser was released. Camino is based on the same Mozilla rendering engine as Firefox, but unlike Firefox, Camino behaves much more like a native OSX application, without a lot of the overhead (such as the XUL user interface) that Firefox brings with it. Ever since I started using the Mac, I’ve never been a big fan of Safari. I have used Firefox up till now, but I’ve been getting less and less excited about it....
About half a year ago, I started using an old PowerBook at work. Shortly afterwards, I was hooked and bought a MacBook for my wife. Now I finally bought a Mac for myself: a shiny, nice MacBook Pro. One of the great things about the Mac is that it is highly usable right out of the box. It includes a decent browser, a very nice email application, a chat application, video editing tools, audio software, and much more....
As I promised, here is the second part of my notes on setting up a new Mac. This time I will focus on development tools for Ruby on Rails. In theory, Ruby is already installed on the Mac. Unfortunately, the bundled Ruby interpreter has some problems, and even if it didn’t, you’d want to use a more up-to-date version than 1.8.2 (which is included in OSX as of Tiger) for Rails development....
With relatively little fanfare, Firefox 2.0 was released last week. (Yes, I know, IE 7 was also released recently. Does anybody actually still use IE???) Firefox 2.0 brings some very nice improvements. My favorite feature is session recovery. Although Firefox is generally pretty stable, it nevertheless suffers the occasional crash. Thanks to session recovery, it is now possible after a restart to continue where one left off before the crash. Firefox can also be configured to always start with the previous session, which is a tremendous improvement....