Yeah, I lied. The truth is that I have not begun to code on the Mac. I have even removed all of the development tools from my system.
It’s not that I don’t want to code. It has more to do with two distinctly different things. First, I seriously lack the time and energy to sit down at home with my computer for any long stretch and program. Second, I really haven’t coded seriously in a long time. I am very out of practice, so much so that looking at anything besides a shell or Perl script, html or PHP looks very foreign.
I am preparing myself mentally and, well, technically to undertake a new project…
Coding on the Mac
You see, one of my favorite utilities in the PC world is Password Safe. Unfortunately, there is no OS X version of the software. There is a tk/tcl version called Password Gorilla that works (kinda) on the Mac, but since it is a tk/tcl program is not, shall we say Mac friendly. To this end, I am going to attempt (and I do mean attempt) to port Password Safe to the Mac. I can even do this since Password Safe is open source.
Tonight I have reached my first milestone – I installed Xcode. This might not seem like much of an accomplishment, something not worthy of a milestone, but let me explain. The last development environment I installed on any computer was Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005. VS is a beast. It installs off of one CD, but it takes a couple hours to install. Oh, and did I mention that it really hooks itself into your computer? It seems to make everything much slower. And that is on a fairly powerful laptop with it’s memory maxed out at 2gb. Xcode has a much quicker and equally processor intensive install.
Next step – investigate Xcode and determine whether I can actually port this app over to the Mac.