Apple - iMac - Design

Apple recently released a shiney new version of the iMac and personally I think it looks very nice and as usual Apple does a good job of marketing that they have great design. The specs look pretty reasonable for the price even if I could build a linux machine at half the cost with probably alot more kick under the hood, but I’ve always been a sucker for stylish design even it’s not the best hardware in the world.

So why buy a Mac, well personally I really like OS X (Apple’s Operating system) and with Leopard coming out in October, a new Mac kitted out with Leopard would be pretty sweet. For the past few years I’ve been using an iMac G5 for most of my work, Ubuntu Linux for a small part of that and practically zero Microsoft Windows.

As good as it might look with all it’s shiney aluminium and glass, I really don’t expect it to be perfect. I’ve yet to buy a computer which hasn’t had a problem regardless of what operating system platform I was using. In fact my current 3 year old iMac had a ram failure within a couple of months of leaving the showroom and even now I think the fans are too noisy so hopefully the latest genration iMacs have been around long enough now to iron out any design faults.

So Apple has definately dressed to impress, and I hope it’s as good as it looks. This time, I’m quitely confident that it will be.

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While I ventured into my Ruby on Rails experience, I found this great text editor called Textmate that is recommended by the Rails team for Mac users. Unfortunately there isn’t a version for Windows so you’ll have to convert to Mac if you want it.

Personally I’ve never really been a big fan of text editors for any serious work and this has mainly been because they have never had much functionality up until now. Textmate is a very cool editor having the ability to provide code structure, highlighting, code block collapsing and so much more.

You can code HTML, Applescript, Javascript, Ruby, XML and more. This is one texteditor that is full of surprises with plenty of options for even the most hardcore coding junkie.

Once you start using it you’ll find it very addictive thinking hey, I can use Textmate to code this, and I can use textmate to code that. So crunch time… how much is it? Well it only costs around AUS$70 which isn’t alot for such an extensive and well designed texteditor that is more than capable of handling all your coding duties and more. If your not sure you’ll like it, you can download the trial version for a limited time before you decide to hand over any cash.

Find out more about Textmate from www.macromates.com.

I came across this tip on how to set the system alert volume without affecting your system volume. So if your listening to iTunes you can adjust the system alert volume independant of your music volume. I thought it was a great tip so if you are a mac user go and check it out at Macworld

By the way you need to be running Tiger OS X 10.4 or 10.3.