On the Mac and OS X Chrome does not disappoint one bit. It is as intuitive and nimble as we’ve grown accustomed to. I don’t know how it behaves on Windows, but it just feels so native and good in OS X. Well done Google. It is FAST! I hope the speed does not degrade over time, but the first couple of hours have been a noticeable speed improvement even compared to Safari.

Stability is key. If you consider that Firefox brings an entire system down if you have more than 10 tabs open at a time. (Okay, I may be exaggerating… but Firefox irks me these days!). Chrome does it well enough. I’m impressed so far. Funny, it loads a new helper for every tab open, so technically it should kill your system, but it just keep going and going. They did it properly, I assume.

If you’re used to Safari and its developer tools, Chrome would feel right at home. Since both are powered by Webkit it uses the same developer tools. Now, here I do miss Firebug, still, Firebug alone won’t make me forgive Firefox!

What also impress me is how intuitive the search functionality behaves. You won’t see a seperate search box like in other browsers. That is because you don’t need it. You simply enter your keywords in the address bar and it defaults to a Google search for your keywords. Very, very slick.

It has been a bloody long wait. I can honestly say, the last time I’ve been this excited about anything was after I installed Leopard. Unfortunately Slow Leopard was a big let down, but since I spend most my day in the browser, Chrome makes it great again! I hope I won’t have to retract most of what I’ve said here. Time will be the true test.

Into my life prowls Snow Leopard. Since I’ve upgraded I’ve had the Apple Blue Screen of Death twice. Apple seriously need to sort out their flakey 64bit OS. Really.

While I’m at it, isn’t this 64bit OS supposed to be faster?! On my Unibody Macbook it certainly is not. In fact, it is slower and I see the dreaded pinwheel of death more and more.

Dare I say I see a re-install coming? Or worse, downgrade to Leopard again? That is the Windows way which is not why we use Apple. Anybody else experiencing serious issues with Snow Leopard?

Coda = $99 vs. Komodo Edit = Free & Open Source

Coda is Mac only, while Komodo supports Mac, Windows and Linux!

There are a lot of great code editors for OS X if you are willing to pay. If you develop, it is vital that you are happy with your environment and that you feel comfortable with it. I don’t want a big heavy toolbox that can install the entire kitchen plus the kitchen sink. I’m quite happy with writing command line scripts to deploy changes rather than have an IDE do it for me. I don’t really like code insight. I don’t care much for code completion. I’m a simple guy, enjoying simple things.

We bought Coda last year. It is IMHO one of the best editors. I know Textmate is also pretty decent, but we cannot go pay for all editors now can we? Simply wouldn’t make sense.

Thing is, Coda doesn’t fit like a glove for Python. Somehow it does not honor the settings “spaces instead of tabs” properly. If you write Python, that’s a big, big thing! Komodo on the other hand, does it brilliantly. It converts tabs to spaces as it should.

I like quick access to my source files. A file system tree in the sidebar is a big, big thing. I need to be able to quickly access my files without much effort. Coda has a fantastic file system browser in the side bar. It supports one click opens, which is even better! Komodo, does not have such a file system browser, but if you create a komodo project and drop the project file in a directory, it will give you the same access to the files, though you have to double click. Lazy, I know ;)

On that note, something I really, really, REALLY love about Komodo is that if you are in a file and you hit ⌘+ O it opens the filesystem dialog in the directory that that file you’re on is. Coda opens the directory that you were in last. Funny, but you don’t even know what a great feature this is until you experience it!

Coda has built in SVN integration. Now, I prefer to run commands on the command line. I write deploy scripts and Python Fabric recipes. So this is not critical, but what I do like about this is that if you create a new file in Coda, it already adds it to your repository. You don’t have to do a svn add /path/to/file on the command line, which saves you a bit of time. It is not a deal breaker, but a nice to have.

The really cool thing about Komodo Edit is the VIM key bindings. This is done brilliantly by them. Coda does not support this which is a pity. If you love VIM you would love the VIM key bindings in Komodo Edit. Really kudos to the Activestate development team. Now, I know there are lots of other editors that does this, but I’ve never really liked it much as it always kind of gets in the way some way or another. With Komodo it simply feels right! For the Emacs dudes, they support that as well.

Coda has some other great features like a built in terminal, easy find in files (which is very handy at times), spotlight-like open if you hit Control + Q (don’t hit ⌘ + Q, it is not exactly the same thing now…).

Both has plugins and the ability for developers to create their own plugins. Komodo does their plugins similar to Firefox using XUL and XPCOM, which makes it easier if you have developed Firefox plugins before.

Komodo has code folding, which Coda doesn’t have. I like folding code :)

Coda allows you to share a file and collaborate on it. This is quite a handy feature! We’ve used it quite a couple of times, believe it or not!

Both are excellent editors. Considering the price tags, I’d say Komodo is a clear winner by a long shot. However, I will not abandon Coda just yet… There are some things that does make it very, very useful… If only these dudes could mix and match their features. That would be great!

In your preference window you can select:
⌘ – click opens a link in a new tab

Brilliant. Clicking on links in different ways does different things with those links.

The problem though is that when a link on a site has the HTML attribute target=”_blank” set (which opens a new window) Safari opens a new window instead of a new tab for that window. Firefox handles it correct in that it opens a new tab, not a new window.

However, this can be fixed easily on Mac. Simply open up the terminal and execute:

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

After that, restart Safari if it was running for the setting to take effect and the problem is solved.

On Windows it seems there are no easy fix. We had a look this morning and could not find something.

This is quite a stupid mistake Apple made. If you look at how intuitive OSX is and how big they are on usability, this is shocking by Apple standards. Even the fix on OSX is such an obscure one. Why not simply add it to the preferences window? Why should one have to run a command to fix it? Blegh. We’ll see what happens.

$ cd /Volume/FlashDiskName
$ ls -al

I saw there was a hidden folder called .Trash and when I did a scan of that folder I noticed it is full of old shit long time deleted. Now, for me it was cool every time going on the command line to empty the hidden trash folder, but just now Lester complained that it is not going to work so well for him :/

The solution on OS X is to enable Finder to show hidden files. Here are the steps:

Open up your Terminal.app (it can be found in Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app)
On the command line do the following:

$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
$ killall Finder

Open up Finder again and go to your flash drive and you’ll see the .Trash folder. Empty the bugger.

I’m not sure why some flash drives do this. I’m not even sure if all of them do it. Maybe there is a better way somewhere out there to disable flash drives doing it. If you know of some way, let us know!

1. Open your terminal (Found in Applications > Utilities > Terminal.app)
2. On the command line type in emacs and press enter. This would open Emacs for you
3. In Emacs press Esc+x and type in tetris and press enter. Viola! you are playing Tetris!

Of course, as you can see from the screenshot below, its not the best quality you’ve ever seen! Thing is, if you feel traumatized at work for whatever reason and you cannot wait for Quinn to download, this is a good alternative! ;-)