PC to Mac – A proud web developer’s story

Jan 15, 2013 by Shannon Young

I am not ashamed to admit it, I once was a Windows ‘fanboi’.

When I thought of Mac’s and the average user it was not pretty. Images of a human hand, with fused together fingers and one unified fingerprint for use with the single click mouse, and various other misconceptions.

One of the biggest struggles for me was keyboard shortcuts. I now find myself cursing on a Windows machine when I press ‘Alt Gr’ and C to try and copy something. The other was window management.

Writing code.

Web development on a Windows machine in my early days consisted of Dreamweaver’s code view and that was that.

The stigma of using Dreamweaver and its misleading ‘Design’ view made me switch to a text editor only application and testing my code in browsers, this in my opinion makes you a better developer not relying on autocomplete.

Current Code Editors

• Windows – Notepad++
• Mac – Sublime Text 2 (This is now available on Windows too)

Local vs. Local-host

Local only works for static HTML pages, and is not that useful for WordPress installations or any other dynamic project that includes PHP and MySQL databases. Moving away from constantly uploading via FTP to a Local-host environment will speed up your development time.

• For Windows local-host development I use XAMPP.
• For Mac local-host development i use MAMP.

The “TL;DR” (too long, didn’t read) Conclusion.

• Do not be afraid of switching to another OS.
• Lose any views you have on Mac users.
• It will be tough to start with, hang in there buddy/buddette.
• My list of apps below will help with the transition.

Apps/Programs I use/used.

Windows

• Code editing – Notepad ++ with Zen Coding plugin. (Now known as Emmet)
• Code testing environment – XAMPP
• Code preprocessing – SimpLess
• Uploading – FileZilla

Mac

• Code editing – Sublime text 2 with Package manager then install Zen coding (Now known as Emmet), CSS Comb, Less + Sass Syntax highlighting
• Code testing environment – MAMP + Modern browsers + Browserstack for legacy browsers and device testing. Also Web Developer toolbar plugin.
• Code preprocessing – CodeKit (at home) LESS App (at work, only due to OSX support)
• Uploading – Transmit
• Bonus software
  • RSS Subscriptions – Reeder
  • Screen capture – Screeny

How about you?

Have you faced a similar transition in development environment and how did you find the switch? Is there an app or piece of Software that could be added that you find useful ?