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How I ended up with Mac

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Re: How I ended up with Mac

#101

Post by McUsr »

xentronium wrote: post #47
chimeracoder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But http://macports.org has a solid repository of packages. The problem comes when you start wanting to use things that aren't on Macports, and are only on homebrew (or maybe fink). But homebrew won't work with macports! So either you have to install one package or the other manually, or you have to install both macports and homebrew, which means that not only are you dealing with an unsupported setup, but you're a…

It's not that hard, really. You install libraries and console stuff from homebrew, gui applications from app store and forget about macports.

I'd say the opposite, forget about Homebrew and keep Macports. The whole thing may not be so easy to use at first, but when you have read the docs for the port system, it all makes much more sense.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#102

Post by MikeKusold »

Wilya wrote: post #7

I'm always amused by these posts praising how everything just works on the Mac, and how it's so nice not having to worry about [annoying linux/windows stuff #351]. Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen o…

> or you want to connect to a Samba server

I don't have a mac in front of me, but don't you just simply go to Tools -> Connect To Server then type in smb://IPADDRESS ?

Why is this difficult, and what would a better alternative be?

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#103

Post by jfb »

zura wrote: post #94
jfb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want to quit an app so badly?

>so badly Yes, so badly that I even wrote a small menu bar ("tray") utility labeled as "[ X ]". When clicked, it quits an app with the currently active window. But well, this is not an ideal replacement... I'm just very used to quit an app when I'm done working with it, no matter how soon I'll need to re-open it...

Interesting! It has never occurred to me that this would be important. I never quit apps, unless they're misbehaving (which is, admittedly, much more often than I'd like).

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#104

Post by revscat »

meaty wrote: post #93
revscat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract. So... doing "find . -type f -name '*.jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities? > b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent. What were you trying to do? > c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at. man mdls

So... doing "find . -type f -name ' .jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities?* No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse. b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent Automator + Photoshop. > c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at. Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto…

> No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse.

In what way?

> Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.

Moving goalposts. First you said the metadata was opaque. It wasn't. Now you're saying there is lag.

What were you trying to do? I do a lot of photography, and while I am no means a pro -- or even a semi-pro -- I have done automator scripts against iPhoto with zero problems. You still haven't said what you were trying to accomplish.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#105

Post by nohuck13 »

mikeevans wrote: post #40
nohuck13 wrote: post #26

I remember reading the Reddit AMA with Linus Torvalds where someone asked him what his home computer setup was and Linus said MacBook Air. Running Linux of course, but I thought that was interesting. Good hardware can make a huge difference in the experience whatever you are running. I sometimes think people don't give enough credit to Apple for the power of sweet homogenous hardware to make a whole OS/software ecosy…

Looks like he might be switching to the Pixel: https://plus.google.com/u/0/102150693225130002912/posts/dk1a...

Nice.

> I despise widescreen displays, but I had gotten resigned to them. Until now. 3:2, baby!

Who knew.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#106

Post by tptacek »

larrik wrote: post #51
jug6ernaut wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really could not disagree with you more. At any given time i have 3-4 iTerm2 windows open to which if someone closed i would freak and slap them silly. But just because i use the terminal does not mean i don't want a competent file browser. Im not against there dumbed down version, but Finder as it stands simply isnt practical for a developer, and no i don't want to jump into a terminal to do basic tasks that devel…

Plus, iTerm isn't even Terminal, and Terminal is pretty embarrassing.

I'm interested in your reasoning for why Terminal.app is embarrassing. It seems significantly better than, say, rxvt to me.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#107

Post by __--__ »

Wilya wrote: post #7

I'm always amused by these posts praising how everything just works on the Mac, and how it's so nice not having to worry about [annoying linux/windows stuff #351]. Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen o…

Does mac have problems? sure. But it CAN do what you're suggesting. Just get the right finder alternative or crack open the terminal. Done. What Miguel is talking about in the "just works" category is more basic, like sound and graphics.

Have you tried to use a dual screen setup with linux? It took me a week to set that up in a reliable way, and it still required futzing around with every couple of days. Every time I turned on my machine, it was a gamble whether my second screen would show up. As Miguel says in TFA, the sound is inconsistent as well and required constant supervision.

On a mac the sound just works. Plugging in a second screen just works. Hell, plugging in a third USB to DVI graphics adapter just worked. Plug it in, install drivers, done. I never had to worry about it again.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#108

Post by __--__ »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #52
jug6ernaut wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When developing on a mac the Finder is probably the single largest annoyance. I never thought i would ever miss Windows Explorer, but WOW is Finder bad! With that said PathFinder[1] is an awesome replacement for Finder. Expensive but worth every penny. Still not as clean as Windows Explorer, but it is night & day better then Finder. [1]: http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/

I've switched over to mac as well. However, Finder is my #2 annoyance. #1 being I so fricking love Winamp, and nothing has come close to that on a mac (or linux) for that matter. And sure, winamp did come out with a mac app, but it was useless I found...

It's been a while since I've used Winamp, but from what I remember, VLC has a similar interface and functionality.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#109

Post by pifflesnort »

Wilya wrote: post #45
pifflesnort wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suppose I'm just not the target market. Given that your complaints are Samba and weird file name encodings? Yes, I think your assessment is true. (HFS supports UTF-8 file names, so I'm guessing you're doing something weird with file systems that treat filenames as 8-bit ASCII supersets and hope for the best).

From what I could understand when this bit me, OSX uses a different normalization form from what Linux uses (I'm not even sure of what that means, but hey). OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default). So, if you use scp (Finder and the UI seem to convert things on-the-fly) to move files with UTF-8 filenames (mine where of korean origin), you'll end up puzzled because you're supposed to have s…

> OSX uses a different normalization form from what Linux uses (I'm not even sure of what that means, but hey).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normal_form...

> OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default).

It depends on the file system. HFS+ uses UTF-8 NFD, as you noted.

On Linux, ext4 uses whatever encoding your tools happen to use, as long as it's an 8-bit ASCII superset capable of representing / and \0.

On the Mac, this means you can rely on a consistent file encoding, and you never wind up with weird encoding issues when using different software, sharing files between machines, or when writing code to parse file names.

On Linux, this means you're at the whim of whatever happened to write the file. There's no real way of telling -what- the file name encoding might be, and if you wind up with files with mismatched encodings, you just wind up with garbage.

I think Apple chose the right approach; it's the only way for it to be possible for things to 'just work'

> I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.

Well, technically you were doing black magic, in that:

- scp(1) is not file name encoding-aware.

- The Linux ext* file systems do not provide a guaranteed encoding

If you used a name-encoding aware tool/protocol (such as modern network file systems), and you have consistent and correct encoding on the server (there's no gaurantee with Linux), then transferring files between machines should always "just work".

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#110

Post by pifflesnort »

meaty wrote: post #97
kstrauser wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No - email on iOS is a piece of shit. It regularly drops connections to exchange, mail bombs people when sending a message and IMAP is unreliable as hell as well. Not only that, it starts to lag unbearably after a few days (up to iOS 6). I send and receive a LOT of email - it just can't handle it well. Fire your email and/or network admins. I'm serious. I only receive a couple hundred emails and send a few dozen, s…

> Fire your email and/or network admins. I'm serious. I only receive a couple hundred emails and send a few dozen, so maybe I'm not a heavy user like you are, but I literally can't remember the last time Mail.app crashed. It's always worked, day in, day out, and without failure. I don't think so. We're a large Microsoft consultancy. We have 2 certified exchange admins who know their shit. it's not misconfiguration. O…

> I don't think so. We're a large Microsoft consultancy.

Color me surprised ...

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