WebApp Consulting

I was looking for a system that had Unix power under the hood and a polished Desktop interface, plus I wanted a laptop to add some mobility to my work. A MacBook was a viable option. So I went for it.

I’m a power Windows user and I spent about 3 years working in Linux. However I was impressed by MacOS speed and efficiency, by Expose and Spotlight features, and by preinstalled software such as iLife. Still I couldn’t find a lot of tools I’ve got used to. Having Unix under the hood was a big saver. I added Terminal.app to the Dock, installed MacPorts and XCode tools, and then a lot of packages and command line tools from MySQL server to Midnight Commander. Another plus, MacOS comes with Java preinstalled and optimized. So I could install NetBeans right away.

Then I had to find my way with a different keyboard shortcuts and a slightly different keyboard layout. I remapped CapsLock key to work as Ctrl and turned off option in the preferences for function keys to control hardware settings. After one week the MacBook keyboard is natural for me.

One component that I still cannot understand is the Dock. When you open 30 applications at the same time and want to launch an application quickly from a list of 100 that you use every day — it becomes hard to manage. I searched through Mac forums and found that there exist tools that can help me with Dock. LaunchBar, Butler, and QuickSilver were their names. And I hope that Stacks feature in Leopard will be helpful as well.

After I installed all the tools I needed for my work and learned MacOS a little I started to really enjoy my MacBook. However I lost several pieces of my hardware. My old laser printer had only LPT port which is not supported in modern computers. And my satellite receiver PCI card also wasn’t supported. But that’s all right because I’m going to upgrade them anyway.

The next thing I’m going to try is to plug an external display for more convenient daily work at the desktop. Also I want to try different office suites (from Microsoft, Apple, and Sun) and Adobe applications for work with graphics.

In overall I’m happy that I made the switch. In Windows I always was struggling with the lack of powerful command line support found in Linux. I used cygwin, but it wasn’t well integrated and had its glitches. In Linux I was spending a lot of time configuring the interface, installing different packages, drivers and servers. In my opinion Mac offers the best from the two worlds.

I’ve been building many wordpress themes recently. And my code generators background suggested an idea for a wordpress theme generator.

Many wordpress themes found online have flaws in several areas:

• invalid HTML and/or CSS
• no support for widgets
• theme is easily broken with unusual content
• the license doesn’t allow you to modify the theme

And a theme generator can really help to resolve those issues.

The idea is simple. Put some wizard dialogs that ask for a layout, size, color scheme, header image, icon set — and generate a complete wordpress theme. Sure, it is not something new. You can find several implementations with Google. But I want to make it professional. Backed by a full-featured code generator and spiced with some advanced features (such as Analytics and AdSense) such generator may become quite popular.