[thelist] iBooks, OS X, Macs, Web Development, Laptops, Etc, Etc

[Andy Warwick]

| On 2002/06/11, Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov said:

> I'm planning on purchasing a laptop for school, and, though I have never
> used a Mac, I have been eyeing some laptops in particular from Apple --

<snip>

> How do you folks feel about doing Web work on Apples?

As someone who does web dev for a job (at least part of it) I do *all* my work
on Apples, because - well - it all just works...

> This would be
> hobby-stuff, not really serious contract or academic work, but I would
> expect to be able to run a reasonable CMS development environment on it:
> PHP, Apache, some sort of DBMS (MySQL, Postgres?), etc.

Yep. Currently have Apache, mySQL and PHP running under OS X on my iBook
(wirelessly serving my network via airport). I do most of my dev under OS 9 on a
Blue and White G3, with the directory containing the website mounted via
wireless Appletalk. My browser then connects to the iBook using a hosts file
which serves up the pages. Beauty of this setup is that I can do web dev on the
train or in the graden, having all the unix stuff running locally as well as
serving the network. I have also - on occasions - served up web sites for client
testing by punching a hole in my firewall and letting the iBook serve up pages
over airport connected to my cable modem.

> I know all this
> stuff runs on OS X (since it's based on BSD) but the question is -- does it
> work *well*? Do any of you prefer Macs over PC's for Web development?

Not for development. I still test on PCs (usually by begging on this list :).
but all development is done to W3C standards and on a Mac. The nice thing about
OS X is that it runs all the 'Unix' stuff really, really well, as well as all
the nice GUI stuff like Fireworks and BBEdit.

> Any words of wisdom on laptops in general?

Get a mouse and keyboard for when you aren't on the road; even the best trackpad
will give you painful hands after extended periods. I'd also consider an
external monitor. (My only gripe with the iBook is that when using an external
monitor, and even though the graphics chip has enough memory, it won't do higher
resolutions than 1024 x 768; that is reserved for TiBook.)

HTH

Andy W