Well, I’m back at work which means many of my waking hours are spent writing Java code on Windows. And the thought struck last night that all the cool toys are for the Mac now. Seriously.
Example: TextMate – superb text editor and I’m almost convinced to buy. Mind, there’s a holy war being fought on the text editor front before you even involve things like the OS (or, in the case of Emacs, the OS is likely included). Zap was my editor of choice in the old days on RISC OS. Then when I jumped to Win32 I was sorely disappointed in the available editors – UltraEdit lacked a certain something and I eventually settled on ConTEXT, which suffered a hiatus from which it’s only recently recovered. On the Mac I’m spoiled for choice – SubEthaEdit, TextWrangler, Smultron (if you can survive the misuse of metal) and the aforementioned TextMate.
Another example: Growl. Universal notification system with a centralised presentation/configuration layer. Whether my file has uploaded, e-mail has arrived or I’ve triggered a notification for a completed build via the handy CLI tool, it’s all presented in a abstract and customisable way. When I got bored of reading them on screen I can even forward them to my e-mail account (which could be fun when new mail notifications are turned on).
Oh, and I’m completely unable to find a decent RSS reader for Windows.
Mind, we can’t get around the decent shell on the Mac, while Windows is stuck with it’s DOS style antique until Monad rolls out. And at least IntelliJ runs on anything.
