Posted by Brian294 on September 30, 2010 at 5:39pm
I just got a MacBook Pro last night!
15"
2.66GHz Intel Core i7
512MB video memory
8GB RAM
500 GB HD
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs.html
It's SWEEEEEEET. Well worth the arm and leg.
I need some help: I'm loading it up with software and need some advice. What IDE would you recommend? What virtualization (for Windows/Linux) is best? What external hard disk would be good for Time Machine? What are some other must-haves? Right now I have iWork, MobileMe, and Quickbooks (accounting).
Comments
Congratulations.
For web programming, I personally use Terminal and VI most of the time. But I also sometimes use the combination of SubEthaEdit (text editor) and Cyberduck (SFTP client; acts as a slave to SubEthaEdit and a few other editors so you can just press 'save' in the editor and it automatically uploads your changes).
For desktop programming, Xcode. There aren't any other substantial options.
For VM hosting, a few years ago I used to be a big fan of Parallels, but lately it's been really spammy and annoying. Try http://virtualbox.org/ .
For backups and media storage, I've been really happy with the LaCie mobile firewire drives --- they're bus powered, so you don't have to carry around a separate power supply. http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11030
Other must-haves for me:
Coda
I've used Coda for web development, editor, file transfer, subversion, css editor, java console, preview, find and replace across multiple files, more
http://www.panic.com/coda/
Sharon
Sharon Palmer
Time Machine
Micro Center had a glut of 1TB MyBook Mac Edition external HD USB 2.0, for about $100, probably less now. They are back in the mac section, they were cheaper than the same product made for PC. I have two and have great experiences.
http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.phtml?Ntt=mybook+extern...
Not great for lugging around, but I believe time machine drives should stay put and always be ready to rock, so it works out. You also could partition your internal HD, doesn't need to be huge. It won't save you in an HD failure, but it will rescue you when you inadvertently copy over your 'sites' folder or do something else really stupid and need to revert on the road. However, you still want to use an ext. HD for train wreck salivations.
Conversely, for self contained ext mobile drive that rugged style LaCie has lived up to its marketing.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822154368&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleKWLess&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleKWLess--NA--NA-_-NA
For Visualization Virtual box
For Visualization Virtual box is the only way to go. free, on average run 10-25% faster, and doesn't take a huge amount of extra space. and more/better networking options to test your setup before deployment.
Parallels is designed as away of using PC apps on a mac as such the features/performance is really targeted to single use front end apps, VM fusion I know people who sware by it but I am not a huge fan of VMware and their can be some real performance hits for no reason
for Dev work
Terminal and VI or Nano both work quite well but don't really have that "Mac" experience
Coda and BBedit are both great apps
in the last few versions BBedit has gotten a little bit on the bloated side but still runs well
Coda is really quite well targeted for web developers fast and clean with not a ton of extra's
there is also a mac port of bluefish which is pretty nice
for time Machine there is one major catch with it. its not designed to recover from a complete failure, it is possible but extremely difficult to recover files if your laptop goes up in flames but it is however great if you deleted a file that you really needed
the Dot Mac / mobile me is ok. but has some real performance issues upload a file and you cannot always use it right away at another spot, I prefer Carbonite for backups or just attaching to my raided filesystem and using crons to tar important file locations and store them.
Shawn
vbox
Vbox is only partially free there is both a closed source and opensource edition and that fact could be problematic for usage in a commercial situation. I use the OSE (open source edition) at work, but have to compile it my self since there the pre-built versions are not kept up to date.
I love VMware Fusion on my Mac
Let me just say -- VMware Fusion on the Mac is just incredible. I've not used Parallels so I can't compare, but it's seamless and the unity mode that projects your Windows or Linux apps directly on your Mac desktop is just incredible. I run Internet Explorer for all those corporate web sites that only work on IE (darn IE anyways) and it runs as a window right along side of my more favorite Mac apps. For seamlessness, Fusion is really nice.
Text editor? Is there anything better than VI?
Okay, so VI is really my favorite text editor (I'm an *nix geek and love command line), but TextWrangler is not bad if you need or want a GUI-based text editor.
Eclipse/Netbeans
For PHP IDE if you really want to do it right. I love VI (actually VIM) but I get more work done in Eclipse.
Backup
Don't by by brand on the outside. See what disk they have on the inside. I've had better luck with drives from WD than any of the other HD makers.