mac/evangelism

So the latest and greatest thing everyone wants to do with computers is create websites, and put creative stuff up on-line. Well it just so happens MacOS X is the perfect place to do that, no matter if you're a just learning to use a computer or a pro-user. For starters you have Apple's built-in softwareiLife, which includes, iPhoto, iWeb, Garageband, and iMovie, and they're on-line service .Mac. Using these together one can quickly create a website, a blog, put pictures on-line, put out a podcast , put up home movies, etc. Without more than a few clicks, drags, and drops. There's no difficult configuring of components, hardware, or settings. Everything just flows easily the way it should.

Also since MacOS X is has UNIX at it's core, it interacts seamlessly with web servers, since most are based on UNIX as well. Well, that's really great for the more advanced user. No need to download an SSH client like on Windows to connect to your server. Just pop open Apple's Terminal application and you're on your way. You can even connect to some servers right from the Desktop (although unless they're WebDAV you won't be able to upload anything from the Desktop). Also MacOS X comes with Apache (a web server), MySQL (a database server), PHP, and Perl built right in so you can use your Mac for a web server if you want instead of uploading your site to one. Now you would assume well you must have to configure this in Terminal, and it must be really hard. Nope! It's ready to go the instant you start your Mac up. Alright, so it's not as easy as just pushing one button, but it's almost that easy, and certainly easier than on Windows. Well, what if the basic install of UNIX based web server software just isn't enough for you? Say, you want to use Ruby, or get some Perl mods, or some other great UNIX open source software. And let's also assume that you aren't a UNIX geek and you don't know how to build software from the source code (as I surely don't). Well you can download either Darwin Ports or Fink, which are both easy to install and then allow you to easily download and build much of the open-source UNIX software available. If you feel comfortable with the Terminal app (which you should be if you're using Darwin Ports or Fink) then you can easily add on software, and if you're not there's even a couple GUI's out there to make it easier. (Although I really have to stress if you aren't comfortable enough running Darwin Ports or Fink from the command line, I'm not really sure what you're going to download with them that you can actually use through the GUI's, because both are really easy UNIX apps to use).

OK, enough about UNIX. There's a world of tools out there JUST for the Mac that making building complex modern web sites and web apps even easier then you could ever imagine. But that's to come in my next posts. So stay tuned…