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My Mac decision

I was just looking at the new Mac Mini (their recent $499 comp). Now that I do mostly web development, a unix based OS is more and more appealing. There is always Linux, of course, but I currently use applications like Photoshop (GIMP isn't sufficient for me).

How is web development with a Mac? What kind of tools are available? Is it worth switching?

(Please no MAC vs. PC holy war, I just want specifics for web development on a Mac. I program java, perl and PHP.)

I think there is a Dreamweaver version for Macintosh.

There are plenty of tools for doing web development. Most of them are very stable.

Check out Interarchy (FTP client), Textwrangler (http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/textwrangleradmin.shtml) (free, includes a FTP client) and, of course, Dreamweaver MX.

On a standard Mac OS X install, you'll find Apache, PHP, MySQL, Java and a shell terminal (useful for installing apps and configure your VPS).

If you wish to do audio editing, Flash development or video editing, you'll find the tools you need. Check out also www.macworld.com.

Consider this: any portable Mac can do desktop spanning (dual monitor). iBooks will need a patch for that. That's very useful when developing websites.

As for browsers, you'll be able to test your pages on Safari and Firefox but you'll need a PC (or Virtual PC) to test your pages with Explorer 5/6 Win.

Hope this is of help to you.

Corrado

I have been successfully developing on Mac for years now. You can even set up a Mac to run Apache, PHP and MySQL for development purposes. I do test in Windows browsers using Virtual PC.

I work for a web development company and all the work is done on Macintoshes. There is one PC that we use for testing. When I started I wasn't very familiar with OS X, but working on a unix-based operating system has actually made it a lot easier to do development for linux-based hosting. I'm more productive now overall than when I did equivalent work on PCs.