Allen said:
Web coders need to be able to use both and not get to fussy about it...
I have a mac which I love but only had it for about a year. I also have 2 PCs under my desk for testing and *cough* the occasional game.
Why do "Web Coders" need to be able to use Both and not get fussy about it? I am not sure what you are saying here because I have Never had to use one or the other.
This is a very sketchy quote, coders dont really need to be "fussy" about anything. I could code the same quality of work in Notepad as any other IDE because I understand the code. So no matter the platform or software I could produce the same quality of work. And dont mention *cough* "Dreamweaver" *cough*, I dont know any coders that use this ever, and I am serious. The target platform will mostly be Windows(IIS + ASP, ASP,NET, C#, PHP etc) or Linux(mainly Apache + PHP) (maybe Solaris - which is unix anyway and very very small posibility that it would be AIX) but it certainly wont be a MAC. So why do I even need to touch one?
I actually code mostly in Java (enterprise level application servers) for work and I use PHP Designer for most other freelance work. The reason I (and most other people) use
any IDE is to make life easier and quicker, so things like syntax highlighting etc all help. But software produced code is always (to this date with me anyway) a no no.
Eclipse IDE is both available on MAC and PC and has plugins for any language, in fact you can see here Eclipse compared with 7 other IDE's from IBM is one of the top 7;
Seven great PHP IDEs compared
However, PHP Designer is a favorite of mine and not available on MAC...
MPSOFTWARE - phpDesigner - The Best PHP Editor & PHP IDE!
You can see someone asking for an alternative here;
phpDesigner alternative for mac?
so the corresponding question (from a pure devs view) is "what is it your trying to achive?", "What makes you fluid in your work?" and "what makes it easier for you?", and this goes for quite a lot of software (even including design).
Who cares if you can "tell" people you have a MAC. If it works for you and is productive, then cool.
You see, maybe I speak for myself, but I know a lot of coders and I think they (at least) would all say the same thing, Platform + IDE is not the same to us as it is to you designers. MAC's were build by designers for designers, so was most of the software. Its a cult thing. Dont include "Web Coders" and "MAC's" into the same sentence
as that is too general. Maybe web "Designers" and "MAC's"
Coders care more about what is going to "interpret" our work... be that IIS, Apache, Weblogic or Websphere etc or the technical info rather than "I own a MAC".
I could write you 10K words on development scale, unless you mean the designers that hash template code like Wordpress or similar into a site
(Booooooo me), and I dont think that platform and OS would come into account once. Even though I could write what you need for your client in less than 10% of the code; Some designers decide to use wordpress or similar as a template/platform instead of employ a coder to write bespoke code. (cost less? - I think not tbh - have you asked recently compared to your own time invested. FInd a good coder to work with and your sorted!) Maybe I am a little bitter about this, but you see... it is with good reason.
for a short e.g. open source = vulnerable. Any "template" or "foundation" that you use to create something.. I have the source code too. CSS and images just make it LOOK different, the code is the same as what I downloaded and I can see the flaws. So, please dont use this for larger clients!
Edit "
My home set up has MAC and PC sharing a big monitor and mac keyboard via KVM switch so I can flick between as needed."
BTW: KVM switches are out-of-date now. They are slow, sluggish and there is a whole host of problems with USB ones. I work with 3 desktops and 2 laptops daily, I control them all via my main desktop and RealVNC
http://www.realvnc.com/ . If you are on an internal network, its all good to use the free version as it is fully functional. If not, buy the full version (does not really cost a lot)
I can assure you (as a user - cross-platform) that this is the way to go. if you even buy the full version you can scale a target/source/server to a specific resolution fullscreen. So say that you have dual monitors @ 1680*1050 (like me) but one of your laptops is only 1280*800, you can still scale this fullscreen to one of your monitors.
Just press F8 to get the "special" options, like sending "Ctrl + Alt + Del" to a client etc.
Check it out. Well worth it and blows Remote Desktop away (since this requires sessions outside of session 0)
.