Posted by Kieran on August 29, 2009 under Mac | 
Heres the steps I went through to install Snow Leopard on my own machine using retail builds, turned out I was being far more paranoid than I needed to be, but as I usual I suspect taking these precautions always means nothing bad happens!
1) Take the opportunity to spring clean the Mac
2) Backup using Time machine
3) Mirror hard drive using superduper so that if all does goes wrong its easy to return to a previous state
4) Check superduper clone works!
5) Install Snow Leopard
6) Install XCode 3.2 which is on the optional packages of the Snow Leopard dvd, which for having the Clang static analyzer built into the ide (Build and Analyze) is worth upgrading to Snow Leopard for alone
7) Install latest iPhone SDK
Re peform back up rituals 
All in all took a little over an hour most of which I was not sat in front the screen so quite painless and every for me at least appears to be working first time!
Posted by Kieran on November 30, 2008 under Mac |
As a long time PC user (Windows and Debian/Ubuntu) coming to the Mac was not without some fear, now that I have done it, for the mobile and web developers out there heres my top pieces of software thus far
1) Textmate
http://macromates.com/
This Text editor in itself is almost reason to switch to Mac
2) Timemachine
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html
Built into Leopard, having what I assume is an Rsync based backup system built into the operating system is something all operating systems should do, especially with how cheap storage is these days and how imporant the data that many people are storing on relatively fragile laptops!
3) Coda
http://www.panic.com/coda/
text editor + file transfer + svn + css + terminal
This is a true joy to use, if anyone knows anything similar for WIndows please let me know, its great to have all the tools that you use when doing web development in one place
4) Skype
Same as the PC version really, and as a heavy Skype user, I was very pleased that everything worked flawlessly and out of the box
5) Adium
www.adiumx.com
Supports the rest of the instant messaging clients that you are likely to need in one handy application
6) Preview
Again part of Leopard will open most pdf and image formats it seems, and seems to be a lot smoother scrolling through large PDFs and theres a handy preview of each page on the right
7) Parallels
http://www.parallels.com/
For those apps that havent made it to OSX or you cannot find this really does everything it claims to which I was very suprised at!
8 ) Xcode
True pleasure to use the inbuilt documentation makes the progression to Objective C a very painless one
