Introduction to Ruby for Mac OS X : The Principle of Least Surprise by Jim Menard

This course is from The University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia, and is the complete video recording of lectures in progress. It is free to download to everyone everywhere regardless of whether you have an iTunes store account or not. I have gone through 25 out of 46 available lectures till now and I find it really excellent with the tutor keeping the students very interested in the stuff being taught while maintaining a real interactive note throughout. The image below describes the course in full.

Click on the image to view it in full size.

Since the rollout of Leopard update 10.5.6 it is now possible to enable the four finger gestures that the new ‘unibody MacBook Pro’ has built in. It is a very simple process and should work for everybody if you follow the instructions correctly. I myself did it and it worked perfectly well.

The AnandTech staff compared the 2.4GHz and 2.5GHz models of MacBook Pro back in February which are the same processors offered in the recent releases as well. The MacBook Pro has 2.4GHz or 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn processors with 3MB or 6MB L2 cache respectively.

I really like this application (for Mac) Keycue; it helps you to use the Mac OS X applications more effectively by displaying a concise table of all currently available menu shortcuts.

This one is an article by Stan Veit, former editor-in-chief of Computer Shopper magazine who were one of the first retailers to deal with the ‘new in the business’ Apple Computer in the late 1970s. In their own words by the magazine:

Stan Veit, Editor in Chief Emeritus of Computer Shopper, was the Editor in Chief of Computer Shopper magazine from 1983 to 1988, and Editor in Chief/Publisher from 1988 to 1990. Well before that, he was intimately connected to the personal computer revolution, a pioneer in the computer retail business who dealt with many of the industry’s movers and shakers (as well as many now-forgotten luminaries). Here, in the first in a series, he relates his experiences with two Steves, founders of a certain well-known computer behemoth…

Read it here.

These are some screen-shots from the OS X Leopard in action on my Mac. Click each picture for a larger view.

Desktop - OS X Leopard

iTunes for music

(more…)

Now that I have made the switch to Mac OS X, I am updating my list of applications (previous post) that I use for technical as well as general purposes. When it comes to ‘getting the job done’, these applications are of great value.

• Operating System - OS X Leopard
• Integrated Development Environment - Xcode, Netbeans 6.5, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (on XP Pro using VMware Fusion), Adobe Dreamweaver, TextMate, Terminal
• Languages - VB.NET, Ruby, C, C++, C#, ASP.NET, HTML, Javascript
• Content Manegment System - Joomla
• FTP client - FileZilla
• Blog - Wordpress
• Blog Publishing - Windows Live Writer (this one has really no substitute, its excellent, although i have to run it virtually)
• Backup - Time Machine, Mozy Home
• Browser - Safari, Firefox and IE7 (for testing only)
• Mail Client - Mail
• Antivirus - Don’t need it anymore, yippie
• Firewall - Doorstop X Firewall for Mac
• Graphics Program - Adobe Photoshop
• Photo Editor - Aperture
• Others - VMware Fusion ( I Use it to bootup XP Pro or Ubuntu 8.10 virtually), iWork, Office 2007 (virtually), Evernote (for the mac it’s an excellent alternate of OneNote), Adium (all chat clients signed at once)

An article from InfoWorld, not just blatant fanboyism but an analysis supported by solid ground. Read “Why developers prefer Macs“.

Its been two weeks now since I have been using OS X and I find it an extremely stable and interactive operating system to use.

One of my gripes while using it was that in Finder window, there was no displaying of the path from the root to the current folder or file, something I find useful sometimes.

Turns out, you have to write the following command in Terminal to activate the display of the path in the top of the Finder window:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Press return after typing the above line, hold down the ‘option’ key and right click on the Finder in Dock and click relaunch. To undo the change just replace the YES with NO in the above line and do the whole procedure again.