Meld is, by far, the best diff viewer & editor that I have used. Earlier I posted about getting Meld up and running on OSX and overcoming a couple of issues. With the current version of MacPorts (1.7.1) and Meld 1.2, it’s much easier :) Read the rest of this entry »

Coming from a lifetime as a Mac user you can imagine that I am rather trusting of the OS, especially as a creative tool. In recent years, as Apple has evolved OS X, it has continued to surprise me (in a good sort of way.)

Regarding their OS X server, given that I have used it since 2001, I was rather excited to try it out in my new web software venture. My impression was it would be as easy to run a web site on OS X server as it is easy to manage a creative project.

Wrong.

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So far the best diff viewer I have used is Meld, which up to now I could only use on my Ubuntu Linux partition. But now, thanks to Macports, I got it running on OS X. Yeah!

Update

I wrote this article about a year ago. As usual, technology advances, and this time it is in our favor. The hack for the .xinitrc is no longer necessary. On my machine I can install Meld straight from MacPorts and it runs straight away.

This took a bit of work, but I finally got Meld to run on OS X. The installation is very easy…just tell Macports to install Meld. In your terminal type:

sudo port install meld

Getting Meld to run on OS X was a bit trickier. When launching it normally I kept getting this error: Read the rest of this entry »

This is a response to an article asking why people switch from Windows to the Mac OS instead of Ubuntu. The author concludes “So why are people not going over to Ubuntu? Beats me.” He even resorts to calling these switchers stupid: “Is it the snob value or stupidity that make people consider a Mac over Windows and not Ubuntu?”

I started this blog in July as a public exploration of my experimentation with Ubuntu. In that time I have tried to use Ubuntu as my default OS in replacement of the Mac OS because I wanted to see how feasible it was. While the simple answer to “can if be done?” is “yes,” it’s really not very easy. So my comments below come from someone who truly enjoys using Ubuntu Linux (I still use it daily) but who has come to appreciate the finer nuances of the Mac OS.

While the author of the aforementioned article does make a few good points about how far Ubuntu Linux has come he fails to recognize a few very basic advantages of the Mac platform that I have come to appreciate during my experiment:

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The moment Yojimbo was released I grabbed a copy. I have used it daily ever since. Yojimbo is a very nice tool for quickly collecting bits of textual data in a searchable, taggable, and secure manner. But it has its limitations. Most notably—it only runs on Mac OS X. But it also suffers from a lack of export features :(

As I have move my life over to linux (and open source software in general) I have been in search of a suitable alternative. My favorite, thus far, has been the simple Tiddlywiki. Incollector is a close runner up, but it fails the cross-platform test (it only runs on Windows and Linux, not the Mac OS.) Read the rest of this entry »