Strongly Typed

Last night and tonight I've been playing around with my MacBook and getting it configured the way I want. This mostly involves learning how things work on OS X and finding a few pieces of software to compliment what comes with OS X.

Last night my goal was to install everything necessary for Ruby-on-Rails development. After some googling I was able to find this link, which does an excellent job of detailing how to install/set-up a RoR dev environment. I opted to install LightTPD 1.4.10 which caused some problems until I found a bug report which detailed a work-around. If you're like me and prefer a GUI for MySQL you can download MySQL Administrator, which runs fine using Rosetta.

After the RoR environment was set up I pulled down the latest Typo code and set it up locally so I can test themes and/or take a crack at developing my own. Looking at the Typo code seems like it would also be a good way to learn some more about Rails.

One of the things I've noticed is that Mac people still pay for software. On the PC, whether it's Windows or Linux, for the most part it's easy to find open-source/free tools (notepad2, SmartFTP, RSS Bandit, Reflector, etc, come to mind) while on the Mac most of the tools people recommend are shareware. So, after playing around with TextMate for a little bit I bought a license for it. I think one of the reasons that people pay for software in the OS X world is that the prices are more reasonable. I'll gladly pay ~$45 for TextMate when the alternative is $284 for SlickEdit.