Setting Up My Workstation On My MacBook
Since I now have my very own laptop, which is very personal with a very limited interference from other people around (unlike the PC), I have completely moved my work from the PC to the Macbook.
The first thing to do was to download and install the necessary applications, which are needed almost everyday. That amounts to quite a large number of applications, but I wisely chose the best ones according to my needs, and eliminated the ones which are currently unnecessary.
My Macbook came bundled with iLife, so I thought that I wouldn’t be needing quite a lot of new applications, but sadly I was wrong. iLife consists of iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb. While I consider most of these to be all-play-no-work apps, even the productive ones such as iPhoto or iWeb, have no use for me, currently. So instead of removing them completely, I removed their icons from my dock.
For music, there is of course iTunes. How I wish I could have Amarok here, but sadly, its still a long wait till Amarok 2. Until then, all my music comes from the so-so iTunes.
For web browsing, the obvious choice was Opera. No compromises there. Opera is awesome on every platform that I have used it on – Windows, Linux, and now on Mac OS X. The Opera Sync feature took care of the transfer of bookmarks and other personalized settings from my PC to my Macbook. Though I have a copy of Firefox 3 installed on my system, just in case I run into any compatibility issues.
For my chat and IM needs, I found a quick and useful app, quite similar to Pidgin (the app that I’ve been using previously on my Linux box) called Adium. It integrates well into my work environment and handles all the different IM services like GChat, Yahoo!, and MSN. One thing that is missing is IRC, and from their forum, I got to know that adding IRC support has quite a low priority in their development objectives list. I am used to visiting IRC support channels or development channels, whenever I need help, or whenever I want to get updates on the development of my favorite open source project. What this means for me is that I’ll have to get an external IRC application. Until I find I good one, I’m using Opera.
For voice and video chat – Skype. Too much said about it. It is the best I have seen out there, but I would certainly love it more if they weren’t such absolute control freaks. Looks to me that they are turning the way Real did around 10 years ago. They lost their market because they became stupid and were trying to control too much of your PC with their product. About Skype – awesome sound quality, good video quality too. It’s just my crappy MTNL connection that causes me to keep on dropping from conversations.
For Bit Torrent, I first tried out BitRocket. Too buggy and plain for me. Next I tried Transmission. Transmission though is lightweight and minimalistic, but it lacks necessary features such as DHT and the GUI is quite unresponsive. This compelled me to download Vuze (Azureus), but I am refraining from installing it until Transmission is doing the job. Again, here I am missing uTorrent, or shall I say, KTorrent. Both were awesome in terms of integration with the environment and in terms of features. Sadly, unlike Amarok, both of these are nowhere near to being ported to Mac OS X.
Other small apps which I am using are Flickr Uploadr (Since I now have a phone with a 2 MP camera, which is almost always in my pocket, I like to take snaps whenever I can, and also like to share them with the world. See my Flickr page for more), Vidalia (for some anonymity on the internet), InsomniaX (a hack to keep your laptop awake even when you close the lid, useful for downloads and securing your running applications easily while you’re away), AppCleaner (Finds all related files for an application and allows you to unistall an application cleanly; rather than just dragging it into the trash, which leaves the config files behind), Newsfire (a crappy RSS reader, nowhere close to matching the usability of aKregator), and Fetch (a shareware copy of an FTP client, is simple and decent, but I wouldn’t want to shell out money for that).
These are the applications that currently comprise my workstation. I have got a decent start, and will surely find better applications that suit my needs as I go further. Till then, I’m busy reading the oh-so-friendly-focus-grabbing Mac help.
If you liked this post, or found it useful, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feeds. Or you can get my posts delivered to your inbox directly, by subscribing to my feeds by email. Or maybe you'd like to know what I'm doing right now, by following me at Twitter.
smit on 
nazmul hoque on 
mukesh on 
kiran on 
September 9th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
You can get a free education license for Fetch.
NetNewsWire is far better than most RSS Feed Readers.
Transmission is excellent. Till you need DHT.
For your other needs virtualize!
September 9th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
For IRC, the best you can get is Colloquy. It’s pretty minimalistic, and lacks some of the features of xChat, but it’s good enough for everyday use.
BTW, I guess you still haven’t seen this : http://mac.kde.org/
It’s huge, but worth it if you miss AmaroK too much. I don’t care much about media players and web browsers, so I haven’t downloaded this. Just as long as I have my text editor and my trusty terminal …
September 10th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
“InsomniaX (a hack to keep your laptop awake even when you close the lid, useful for downloads and securing your running applications easily while you’re away)”
Eh? Why on earth do you need a separate app for that? Isn’t this something which can be configured from power management options in most OSes (what action to take when laptop lid is closed)?
September 10th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Probably Steve Jobs wants his laptop to go to sleep when the lid is closed. BTW, Steve Jobs also likes to see the icons on his desktop while he’s browsing the web, that’s why I can’t maximize Safari to make it cover the entire screen.
Oh well. At least Steve Jobs doesn’t have an fetish for the color brown (I’m looking at *you*, Mark Shuttlesworth).
September 10th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
@xAbhishek
Got the Fetch Educational Licence for free. Seems good now, with no irritating reminders. Looking at NetNewsWire in the meantime.
@Uncool
Hmm, had heard of that before, but currently I’m trying hard not to mess around with things. First I need to build a really stable workstation, learn to build it quickly, take a backup, and then start playing. I can’t play of I don’t have a backup plan.
@Ankur & Uncool
Well, we all know that Apple only gives you what it thinks is necessary for you. In most cases, it is more than enough. In the rare cases, like this one, where it isn’t, you need hacks like these. Its nothing new here. I bought my Macbook even though I was well aware of this fact.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
About maximizing applications, this has been different right from the beginning of Mac OS X. Steve Jobs has nothing to do with this design aspect.
On Windows when you maximize a window its expected behaviour is that it fits to the screen because the program options and menus are bound to the Windows you are working in.
On OS X, the title bar and the menus are on the top, and I think it makes more sense to have your windows take up only as much space as they require on the screen rather than block everything else from view. You can manually adjust Safari’s height and width from the bottom right corner, or use a bookmark that executes a single line of JavaScript to resize your Window.
That hack just changes system settings that you could play around with on the Terminal, so essentially you don’t need an app for it. But yeah, it makes sense to have that in the Energy Saver options.
September 11th, 2008 at 8:40 am
@xAbhishek
When I maximise a window, it would be for one of these 2 reasons –
1) Some of the contents are hidden in the current size of the window, and I want to avoid horizontal or vertical scrolling.
2) I don’t want other things such as the dock or icons or notification to disrupt what I am reading/looking at.
None of these purposes is solved when I click the maximise button on any of the Windows in Mac OS X (Except for perhaps Microsoft Office, which behaves more like it is working in a Windows environment).
September 11th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
1. I think it’s strange when you say that you cannot avoid horizontal navigation when your screen allows you to.
2. I certainly don’t think the dock or icons disrupt what I am looking at when I have the window I want to work with active.
I think you need to give Mac OS X more time because it you might be more used to Linux or the operating system you used before you owned a Mac.
September 11th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Almost apps behave nicely with the maximize button, except Safari. I guess it’s a non-issue, but it was worth mentioning.
I have set the dock to autohide so I can get more screen space. Now I have way more screen space to work with than I had on Windows or Linux. I guess the universal menubar on the top has to do something with that. The dock, too, behaves very nicely with the autohide option. I never used autohide with GNOME because it was simply too clunky to work with. The only thing I still can’t get used to is the way OSX handles minimized applications.
BTW, some vintage systems had a feature called “iconize”, wherein the application you wanted to hide simply became an icon on the desktop. Single clicking the icon brought back the window. I wish I could see this more in modern systems. It was a pretty neat idea. I never really use my desktop for anything anyway (stacks are more than enough).
September 11th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
With Spaces, I think no one really needs to minimize apps anymore.
September 12th, 2008 at 10:29 am
@xAbhishek
Though the concept of Spaces is really nice, but I somehow can’t just get used to it. In Linux too, I never user the multiple desktops. But I think I’ll try and use spaces and see if it makes my life easier.
September 14th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Funny that people buy an all expensive notebook with bad value for money just for that exclusive software that comes with it. Amazing business for Apple for sure.
As Uncool Shitty said, I totally agree that it is a matter of choice, a choice where someone is choosing bundled software over the hardware that actually would matter.
All I am able to see in this discussion is the transition to the OS X platform rather than a new laptop. Looks like you people would buy anything that comes with OS X pre-installed with other legal blah from Apple!
@Apoorv:
Dude, just one thing… a 13″ screen must be taking some time for you to get used to with as now you need window management more than ever before. Besides, being a widescreen notebook, it really isn’t programmer friendly.
Please check this even if you know about it already. I am a little conscious about the money I might spend on the PC I buy!
September 15th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
My reason for buying a MacBook : durability. I don’t know how the MacBook fares these days, but I know people who have owned their iBooks for a very long time now. Hell, there used to be a guy on some random forum I used to visit a few years back who still had an early 90′s Mac (and used it regularly).
I’m trying to get used to OSX the platform because, well, it was the platform supplied by the hardware vendor (Apple). You can’t really argue with the fact that OSX is optimized to run on whatever hardware the MacBook uses.
Moreover, I try to use the bundled apps because they integrate well with the OS. I’m not a power user. I want a browser that can render pages, and a media player that can play music. Even though I’d rather have what I’m used to (Ktorrent, AmaroK …), I don’t mind getting used to new stuff.
I’ll repeat what I’ve said many times : I’m a programmer. All that matters to me is that OSX is a UNIX. On a good day, it’s just me, my terminal and my text editor, whatever the platform.
So no. I don’t suck up to Apple. Neither does Apoorv. We bought the machine together, and had practical reasons for doing so.