The online home of John Pollard

Day One with my Mac

So I finally gave in and decided to buy a Mac Mini - to start doing some iOS development.

It’s been a long time since I did much on a Mac - probably 1991(!) on a Mac Classic with a tiny screen - but I have used them a bit in various jobs since.

Other than the initial strangeness of finding my way around, it’s been quite fun so far. Using a Windows keyboard probably isn’t ideal, and I’m still trying to decipher some of the control key combinations. Also the scroll wheel on my mouse works in the opposite way than in Windows, which is also taking a bit of getting used to.

Setting up my various dev projects has been fine so far. Having Ruby already installed helped me with my Jekyll-run blog, and installing node.js was trivially easy too. Heroku toolbelt gave me Git along the way, and the Azure CLI tools work via node so they work nicely too.

One slightly tricky thing was getting a local copy of MongoDB running. This mainly meant going into UNIX mode and hacking a couple of config files post un-TARing the downloaded files, but there was enough support on the web to make that reasonably understandable.

I’ve also setup VNC so I can remote in via my Windows laptop if necessary, so I think I’m good to go with starting with Xcode and the horrible syntax of Objective-C!