Eirik Stavem – to whom it may concern…

Yesterday I received my shiny new MacBook Pro, and it is greeeeeat! I spent most of last evening and night setting it up, and I thought I’d post some notes on the whole process here, with some info about the applications I use most frequently.

After finishing the initial setup through Apple’s simple and intuitive step-by-step installer, I started installing my favourite applications:

- Quicksilver: you just can’t live without this application. I always hide the dock to use the full 900 pixel height for my application windows, and use Ctrl-Space to launch all applications and run AppleScripts etc. I always set it up to start at launch, and only show in the menu bar, not the dock.

- Opera: never leave home without it. Some tweaking here and there to get things looking the way I like, and setting up email- and IRC-accounts.

- BBEdit: my favourite editor when doing web development of any kind. No big changes to the defaults, just turning on line numbers and other minor changes. The only thing I dislike about BBEdit is the icon, so I always head over to Jon Hicks to download his excellent icon and replace the old ugly one.

- Subversion: one of the reasons I got a laptop, is that I’m going to start working on some rather time consuming development projects for work, which also means I’ll need a good version control system. SVN to the rescue! Installing it on OS X was a great deal easier than I thought it would be:
1. Download and install latest version of Subversion for OS X from Martin Ott.
2. Tell your bash shell where to look for Subversion, to make life easier if you’ll be using it from the Terminal, so start your Terminal and type

pico .bash_profile

Paste the following line into the file:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Hit Ctrl-X, then type Y and hit enter. Now restart your terminal or type:

. .bash_profile

then hit enter, and you should be ready to go.
3. I’m not that familiar with all the Subversion-commands, so I also installed svnX, which is a frontend for Subversion. I wasn’t all that impressed with the usability of svnX, and had some problems checking out my repositories on my Dreamhost account, but I eventually got it working.

- Adium: I’ve been using MSN Messenger for several years on Windows, but since there is no decent native client for OS X, I use Adium, with the following Xtras:
* AdiuMSN emoticons
* Decay color theme and list layout, setting window style to borderless window and opacity to 60-70%, this looks really nice and integrates well into my desktop.
* iBubble status icons
* iAdiumBubble 2 dock icons

After installing Adium, and setting the opacity of the main window to 60%, I headed over to Veer to pick up a nice wallpaper, and then installed some of my other favourite applications. I’m constantly on the lookout for good software for OS X, so please let me know if you have any tips.