Forwarding Address: OS X

While the Mac has long had a reputation for providing end users with a great out-of-the-box experience, it's noteworthy that it's steadily gaining an equally good rep among developers. This is especially true among the Ruby on Rails crowd -- Mac OS X is the preferred development platform for the Rails core group. Several counts I took at the recent RailsConf showed that Mac laptops outnumbered Wintel/Lintel ones by a nine-to-one ratio; some people have suggested that the ratio is larger. (In fact, after the Mac, the next most popular machine seemed to be the Nintendo DS.)

This announcement should boost its rep among developers even more: Rails will ship with both the client and server editions of OS X 10.5, a.k.a. "Leopard". Here's what the Riding Rails blog has to say:

The developer seed that was distributed today at WWDC contains Ruby 1.8.4 and Rails 1.1.2, but we fully expect to have Rails 1.2.x along with Mongrel, SQLite bindings, and lots of other Ruby goodies on the final gold master when it goes out in spring.

• Mac QA Engineer - Mountain View
• Mac Software Engineer in Test - Mountain View

• Macintosh Developer - Mountain View
• Senior Macintosh Developer - Mountain View

For those that have auto-update notification turned off, BBEdit 8.2.4 has landed.

John Gruber does an very detailed review of his newly acquired 15" PowerBook. If you are on the fence about a purchase, you might take a few minutes and give this a read. It might help.

Addresses an issue in which high ASCII characters in a password could lead to a blue screen at startup, or prevent log in.

This is probably an old idea, but I haven't seen it around recently (or at all in my case). Spotlight may not be the key to world peace, but at least Apple provides a way to get your special file format indexed. Wouldn't it be nice if Software Update allowed a way for developers to register their app so that users could be notified through a unified interface? Yes, I know there are apps from various mac update sites that do something very similar to this. This would be much simpler for the user, even if it does put a little more load onto the developer.

I guess it would be similar to how Windows Update knows about a few of the non-Windows components on your system (video, nic drivers, etc) only better.

gDisk does pretty much what you think it does, which is basically store files in your gmail account. Which is, for the most part, "cool." It works pretty much how you expect it to work, by creating draft messages and attaching the file. It has the concept of "categories" locally, which correspond to labels on the gmail side. Why they don't just say "labels" is beyond me.

But what doesn't it do? It does not act as a mounted drive like it's Windows and Linux counterparts. It's not a huge deal, and I'm glad something like this finally came out for OS X. But, and you knew it was coming, it's just one more app that has to be launched. Having file system integration saves you that much.

Found via digg (which is the new slashdot, and by "slashdot" I mean "annoying community-driven site").

It is easy to get sucked into Apple's applications that come with OS X, particularly when you compare them to the lame ones that Microsoft includes with XP. But there are ones that are better.

I wasn't all that keen on using IM a few years ago, but it was convenient for a few friends I had. When I first launched iChat, I was quite impressed. I've been using it a few years, and became surprisingly fond of it.

Then Tim Bray recommended Adium, and I took a look at it. In short, if you like iChat but don't use the voice capabilities, you may love Adium. You can make the contacts window much more compact, you can have all your chats in one tabbed window, Adium integrates many more IM services than iChat, and you can change the color schemes easily. If you have a long list of chat partners on different services, Adium will cause you to remove iChat from the dock.

ScreenCastsOnline and MacTV have posted a great screencast that demonstrates some of the wonders of LaunchBar. I'm a longtime fan and user of LaunchBar, but it can be hard to evangelize because it's so unlike anything most users know. (Spotlight has changed that a bit, but that's a post unto itself.)

I thought the use of the Keyboard Viewer was particularly clever. When the utility you're demonstrating has "Keep your hands on the keyboard" as its motto, just following the mouse won't do.

At the end of the screencast, Tom gives a 20% discount code for any LaunchBar orders made until November 30th, 2005. Sweet!