David Alison's Blog

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 hard at things outside my .Net / Visual Studio / C# comfort zone. My positive experience with my Mac switch led me to rethink that strategy, or at least give it a much better try than the quick glances I gave it before. I did a lot of research, found a lot of information and have found lots of controversy as to whether there is a future in Ruby on Rails. I've also found lots of evidence that some pretty large sites are using Ruby on Rails for their projects. In spite of all that...

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 for many, many years. I went from version to version, carrying my PST file with me all along the way. Since the newer versions of Outlook didn't have a problem with PST files larger than 2GB I didn't even bother to archive my e-mails. I liked that I could search through my entire e-mail history, dating back to 1996, at any time. Enter the Problem So what I've been ignoring for a few months now hit me again yesterday when I had to fire up my Windows XP machine to search for an ol...

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 for two primary tasks: creating UI flow charts for my web sites and generating screen mockups to cover functionality in my applications. The UI flow charts are pretty simple since a page on a relatively static web site is easily represented by a small box on a design surface. OmniGraffle does a fine job of doing much of what Visio would do; drag a box out of the stencil list on to my page and there it is. Double click on it to fill in a title or some contents and off I go. Much like Visio I can dr...

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 really just need a single file from a collection of hundreds. In addition I had a problem opening several of my older ZIP files last night. I got this lovely little error: So I started looking around for a simple tool to pull files out of older ZIP archives - ideally something that didn't make me unzip the entire thing. I saw that a number of people recommended StuffIt Deluxe but at $79.99 that just seemed far too much for what I needed. There is of course StuffIt Standard and even the free StuffIt E...

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 Christmas, loving the fact that it had the built in web browser which she uses all the time. As for PCs she's got an older Dell laptop running Windows XP that's been very serviceable. Now that I've gotten into Macs and my oldest daughter has one she is constantly in my office, scheming to get a MacBook for herself. "Daddy, look at this one on Craigslist!!!" "Daddy, the refurbished MacBooks are really inexpensive!!!" "Daddy, don't you want a MacBook Pro s...

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 as my primary desktop I use a slightly different mix of applications on it than I do on my MacBook, which is now my meetings / travel machine. Safari I spend a lot of time in my web browser and Safari continues to be my browser of choice. I have Firefox on my machine and use it for some non-Safari sites at times but by default I look at the web through Safari glasses. I love the performance from it. This is not a knock on Firefox; I'm a huge fan of that browser and really like where...

In the nearly three months I've been blogging about switching to Mac I've had countless times that readers have made comments about my posts, recommending specific techniques, tricks or applications that have helped me improve my Mac experience. Yesterday it was n45800's turn as he pointed me in the direction of a list of the default key bindings for OS X . This little gem was exactly what I needed to get past some of the keyboard issues I've been trying to adjust to . As a touch typist I've really struggled at times to use the Mac keyboard; not necessarily the keyboard itself but the navigation shortcuts while editing text in a text editing surface. Here is a list of the most commonly used keystrokes on Windows XP for text editing and navigation and their Mac OS X equivalents: Purpose Windows Mac OS X Clipboard Commands Copy Ctrl+C Command+C Cut Ctrl+X Command+X Paste Ctrl+V Command+V Selection Commands Select All Ctrl+A Command+A Undo Ctrl+Z Command+Z Redo Ctrl+...