Is Mac OSX the 'best' choice?

I'm just interested to know what other people think here. Suppose I'm web-developing for a *nix box and I'm looking for a single machine for local development.

As part of my development, I'm going to need Photoshop(essential), Dreamweaver(for example), and a local testing Unix server. What do people think regarding the machine I should buy?

What alternatives are there?

IMHO - if you need Photoshop and Dreamweaver, then you can just opt for a windows box; set up just for development purposes as things like servers (Apache in particular) and your scripting languages (php, asp, coldfusion, etc.) are better suited for development on a windows box than they are on a mac IF YOU NEED photoshop and dreamweaver for your daily operations.

Now, on another note - if you are doing any kind of desktop publishing (pre-press, etc.), video editing, or 3d imaging - mac reigns supreme over them all (well, over any consumer or non-industry related available system).


The above is tricky - my setup is excellent what we have here. We have 3 boxes with two of them tied together and the other free from the network. Our *nix box is loaded with mandrake developers edition running apache, php, and heaps of other stuff. Our windows box is xp professional with a bunch of development stuff on it. We develop back and forth between the two but the pages are served from the mandrake box as that is the server. We also use it to test our pages in the *nix browsers.

Personally - I would opt for the two boxes before the one mac for development as that can reach a little farther than the one box - and two boxes (one win, one *nix) would cost the same as one mac box.

Thanks for you detailed reply!

I have one question. You say that Apache and scripting languages are better suited on a Windows box. Why is that given that OSX is Unix?

Go for a dual boot PC, even if Apple's machines are extremely cute (the Powerbooks are a lesson in how a portable computer should be).

Excuse my ignorance here.

This I guess means a machine which I can boot up with either Windows or *nix right.

So suppose I decide to make some small changes to the interface. Would this mean firing up Photoshop in Windows, making the change, rebooting, checking the change, not liking it, rebooting in *nix, etc; or can I run the two systems simultaneously somewhat like VirtualPC on a Mac. Sorry I really know little about Windows machines - just looking at the options!

Also is there some inherent problem with OS X Unix (Darwin) that people don't recommend it for development. Mac laptops don't seem that much more expensive than PCs.

Hate to disagree with my good buddy jpenn, but the new Mac is on fact currently the only way you can test Unix/Apache/PHP development and have Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and other great Mac programs. This is because Mac OS 10 is now based on FreeBSD Unix, which is about as Unix-like as you get.

And I say this as a Unix/Windows user . I personally think the new Macs are great, and intend to get one as soon as finances allow. In fact, the cost of a Mac is the only drawback, IMHO.

Here's a quick anecdote:

My uncle just bought a top-of-the-line G4, with the cinema display. Up until visiting him, my only experience with OS 10 was to click around a little in the computer store. Within 10 minutes of sitting down on this machine, I was able to find the Bash prompt, figure out how to get into superuser mode (it's a little unusual, so you need to read the manual), and have Apache, PHP, and MySQL running (HINT: they are already installed, just not turned on). Also, it is apparently quite easy these days to get my favorite DBMS PostgreSQL running on the new Macs.

So, I personally think you should consider cost, and the possibility of giving up some of your other Windows programs. If you can afford both of these, Mac is a great choice.

macgruder-

In answer to your last question, OS 10, OS X, and Darwin are not... exactly the same. But, they are based on the same core, which is fairly stable these days. OS 10 is what you will use with a standard Mac desktop, as I mention above in my story. The others are very similar, but Darwin doesn't have the Mac desktop, and OS X is aimed at being primarily a server.

In answer to your question just before that, if you decide on Windows, here is my favorite way to develop with a Windows desktop and a Unix server:

1) get a decently-powered machine for Windows 2000 or XP Pro (not Windows XP Home, and not Windows ME, 98 or whatever)

2) Get a cheap used computer, such as a Celeron 500 with 256 MB RAM, and a 20 GB hard drive, which shouldn't cost you more than $300, and make this your FreeBSD or Linux development machine (don't worry, the hardware is more than adequate for testing). Run Samba, so you can browse the Unix box hard disk as a Windows shared drive. With this setup, it is extremely easy to use Windows to edit files, create HTML, save images, etc..., but have the actual data reside on the Unix box. Use UltraEdit as your text editor, and make sure you convert your text files to Unix mode for saving (not necessary for HTML/PHP, but for any shell scripts, Perl, configuration files, or whatever, it is essential).

pabloj-

Dual-boot? bah... I have hardly ever found that to be useful when you want to get real work done. It's fun to play around with different OS's on the same system, but who wants to reboot every time they switch between Windows and Unix?

My setup at work: Dual monitor/dual booting PIII 733 that almost always runs Linux (except when I have to use friggin' webex). I ssh to my RH 8.0 laptop which holds all my code and is my testing server. I run remote xterm and Xemacs sessions on the dual-booting desktop, with the actual apps coming from the laptop.

This gives the me the best of all worlds, in my opinion- I always have my most current code available on a linux machine with Xemacs (my laptop) and can use windows-only crap when I have to.

That said, I write A LOT more code than I do pretty shiny stuff in Fireworks and/or Photoshop.

I've used OS X and I'm not impressed (then again, I can go hours without touching a mouse as well, using only keyboard shortcuts to navigate everything).

OS X wasn't snappy enough, and the eye candy just gets in the way, in my opinion. I also can't bring myself to spend more for nice industrial design. That's me though, spend your money however you want.

I like developing on exactly the same platform I host on, it allows me to play with stuff at will and replicate easily to production servers with a single rsync command.

Thanks for all that great input. Here's my conclusion. I do a lot of coding and a lot of Photoshop work and going by rycamor's comments the only reason not to go for a mac is the expense - although it seems that this is only much of an issue for very low cost machines, and not so much for development machines.
Mac seems to be more compatible in a *nix environment when you have to access to the big design apps as I do; and there's BBEdit which seems just great.

Hope it works out for you

Don't get me wrong; Hero's got a good point too. If you can move your development completely to Linux, then you no longer have to depend on a proprietary platform at all. There are many pros and cons to weigh, though.

There is a good alternative to Photoshop for web developers: GIMP. There is a lot of great multimedia software under development for Linux, including some great 3D packages. One weak area for Linux/Unix users is Flash animation. Another weak area is WYSIWYG HTML development; even though Mozilla, Quanta, and a few others have some good capabilities, nothing in the Linux world comes close to Dreamweaver. However, Wine provides some ways to run Windows software in Linux.

Anyway, this is a big topic, and takes a lot of time to do the groundwork and footwork for this sort of move, so I don't think I would recommend moving in your case at the moment. Think about it for the future, though.

A couple of weeks ago I was at an IBM conference and saw a demo of VMware Workstation 4.0 and was very impressed by it. VMware allows you to run additional Windows, Linux, FreeBSD or Netware instances on a Linux or Windows host. There is a lot of flexibility in how you can network these hosted instances (what they can and can not connect to) using either virtual or real networking. You can take a snapshot of an instance, change it, test it and then restore it back to the snapshot state. You can drag-and-drop files from the host to a virtual machine. You can have shared storage between instances.

I was impressed.

One of the conference session I went to was given by a programmer from Borland. He had a Windows session with Delphi and a SuSE Linux session with Kylix. He would tab between the two writing web services on one platform and consuming them on the other. Since he wasn't affiliated with VMware, I asked him how he like the product. He said he loved it because it allowed him to develop for multiple platforms on a single laptop. He said it had been very stable for him and hadn't crashed his machine.

The one caveat is if you're going to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a computer, the more RAM, CPU and hard drive capacity you have, the better. Surprise, surprise!

For $299, you might want to give it a look.

I'm a happy Mac User, using Mac OS X.2 for web development and other stuff (like Java, Objective C, C++, etc...). I have experience in the Windows World and Linux for the webserver (apache) ans database managment (mysql), and I can obviously tell that Mac OS X is the best plateform to do stuff like that Why ?? Because the UNIX fondation of Mac OS X is able to run UNIX/Linux software like Gimp (yes you can install a X11 window server, provide by Apple, and after install Gimp, AbiWord, KDE, etc...), you have access to standard like Apache, mysql, php, java 1.4.1, etc...the developer tools available in each mac you buy...UNIX fondation bring a lot of stabilities, I have a mac os x server running whith no problem from 1 year (just reboot for system and security update, no bug, no crash ). With Mac OS X you can also run PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, GoLive, Flash, Office, etc...

In resume for me Mac OS X is he best solution. Windows is not easy to use, and bug and crash a lot (i have experience with that stuff, it's not just to tell Windows is bad and Mac is good), Linux is cool but installation is not so easy, if you have a problem you can take the shell and lost hours and hours to know what's the problem

So think about it

PS: sorry for the english, i'm a french swiss

That was in the old days (about 3 years ago). Sense then, in almost all 3d related software, PC has by-passed Macs. In fact, (I forget where I found the bench's) a site took a p4 3ghz, 512MB DDR 3700, Radeon 9800 and compared it to a Dual Power Mac G4 (1.42ghz, 2GB DDR, Geforce 4). The all around performance showed a 27% advantage to the P4 in rendering time. The only advantage the G4 had was rendering poly AAE's.

-andy

Well, I'm a web developer & designer for a living and I've got a PC and a MAC set up, because ... well you have to for cross-platform testing.

To be honest, I spend most of the time on the mac.

Between liking the OS more, and having an apache server running with PERL, PHP, and mySQL so I can test things as I work on them. Its quite handy.

At the end of the day, you can develop on either platform; just upload your files to a server as you make changes and test that way. It comes down to personal preference. For me, the money is much less an issue then being comfortable in working 55 hours a week, so I spend on the mac. I like it more.

- erik