Developing on my PowerBook.
For a long, long time, I’ve always struggled with developing on my 12″ PowerBook G4. The form factor is the most glaring issue, with its tiny keyboard, touchpad, and 1024×768 resolution. Compared to my desktop, I’ve always felt super slow, and fairly silly as I tried to write code.
Recently, as I’ve found the joy that is Apple’s Xcode, I’ve been spending several hours at a time, coding with my little Mac. And, honestly, I’m getting hooked on it. Last night, from 12:00am – 5:00am, I built out an ActionScript 2 Digital Signage Display application that managed XML for its preferences and file references, in a self-sustaining class—and I swear it was easier than developing on my desktop. I utilized TextMate and Flash 8 Professional, and was quite the happy camper. The syntax highighting in TextMate is gorgeous, Flash’s help was easy enough to manage with my keybard, and Alt+Tab & Ctrl+Tab became extremely important quite quickly.
I’ve now spent another several hours in Xcode, and while the UI could use a little extra work (like a tabbed document interface), I’m able to jump through all my files, compile, test, and edit with just a few keystrokes.
Earlier this week, to Ryan, I said I had a really hard time developing on anything beside my desktop, but I’m starting to think that I just never gave my whole Developer-self to the small-scale, keyboard-driven laptop development experience.
when last I saw him, Ryan was using a nifty little text editor for CSS – forget what it was called, but you might want to investigate that as well.
I’ll have to find out which one it is, but he talked about using TextMate with a slightly transparent background and a Live-updating browser behind it (care of TextMate), that allowed for easy styling? Is that it?