I've had this on-again, off-again experience with Ruby on Rails. For those of you that don't know Ruby on Rails is a really simple framework and model for building Web applications very quickly and easily. This is not new news and in fact Ruby on Rails has gotten some very significant attention. As a Microsoft guy for many years I simply glanced in the direction of Rails and said "meh". I was immersed in the Microsoft development tools for so many years I wasn't willing to look very … [Read more...]

When I first got my Mac I also made a fundamental shift in the way I manage my e-mail; I switched from Outlook to Gmail. Since I made that switch I've been quite happy; not only does Gmail give me IMAP access so I can get to it from within Mac's Mail, I can also get to it from my little Motorola phone and from any web browser on a public terminal. Sure, Gmail's IMAP implementation leaves much to be desired but the tagging model is really great.   Prior to switching to Gmail I used Outlook … [Read more...]

The other day I posted an article that three months after switching from Windows to Mac that I had a pretty good set of applications that I was using on a daily basis. I wrapped it up with a couple of things that I was still firing up Windows for and at the top of my list was finding a Mac based replacement for Microsoft Visio.   I had so many people recommend OmniGraffle 5 from The Omni Group that it quickly became something I wanted to check out. I've been a pretty heavy user of Visio … [Read more...]

Last night I was going through my older files looking for a document from long, long ago. Back in the day when disk space was at a premium I used to ZIP up my files on a pretty regular basis. On the Windows platform I evolved through a great many different utilities, from Arc through PKZip, WinZip and finally WinRAR.   While I like that OS X allows me to open most ZIP files without any additional software, I don't like the fact that it simply expands the ZIP file. There are times I … [Read more...]

Granted, it's a beautiful little 13 year old girl of a monster but a monster none the less. It's funny how my youngest child is so into computers. She's completely confident with them, immediately jumping in when my wife has a problem on her XP based laptop and helping trouble shoot any issues. She, like my other kids, can touch type easily and blazes through tasks on the computer like it's an extension of herself.   My youngest was the one that desperately wanted an iPod Touch for … [Read more...]

One of the goals I have with this blog is to give you some perspective on how my experience with a Mac changes over time. Today it's been exactly 3 months since I bought the MacBook and over that time I've played with what seems like hundreds of applications, though only a few of them have actually stuck. I did the same thing after I had the MacBook for 3 weeks and it's changed a bit since then. So here is a list of the applications I use heavily on my Macs. Note that since I have a Mac Pro … [Read more...]