But enough about me, let's talk about my computer. I bought an iBook G4 in December, and I've finally got it set up in a productive manner for developing using Zope. This was no small feat. Prior to my OS shift I was using Linux for most of my Zope development on an x86 box, either via Windows using VNC or directly. I used Kate as my text editor (because it made it easy to jump between all the files involved in a Zope product) and CVS from the command line. I used Mozilla Firebird so that I could have multiple tabs open.

When I had to use Windows, I was generally doing TTW development, again using Firebird.

Now back to OSX. I tried various things from the built-in TextEdit and SubEthaEdit to Eclipse (which seems like it would be more fun if multiple people were involved) and Xcode. In the end I settled on Xcode, because it seemed the most like Kate.

I used to find though that I would get lost on the screen rather a lot, and not know what I was supposed to be doing next. A couple of things were getting in the way:

- Double-clicking on a .py file brings up the PythonIDE (which I don't like - not sure why), and I haven't worked out how to change the program it uses.
- Missing a taskbar a lot. I guess I got used to it. It was taking way too much brain activity to work out where the program I was using was hidden. In the end, I can put that down to too many program icons in the dock. After dumping everything I wasn't using _every day_ from the dock, it works a lot more like the taskbar and I'm much happier.
- Safari for some reason doesn't interact well with the CookieCrumbler, with the result that I couldn't log in to Plone on my box. Seemed to work on ZopeZen, but not locally. Couldn't work out why.

Anyway, I realised a second ago that I was finally happy with the way I was working. I have Mozilla Firebird (3 tabs: ZMI, Plone, ZMI Refresh tab on the product I'm working on), Xcode as my text editor in 3 pane mode (I'm even going to get SCM working now) and a terminal. All are arranged so I can see them on the screen, but I can always use Expose to find what I'm looking for. And of course, iTunes running in the background.

Finally feel like I'm kicking some goals, and settling in on OSX. Now, just got to download the 38Mb OS 10.3.2 update...