I'm having a lot of fun on the new Mac. In general though, I'm finding things a little hard to get used to, like no right-click-New Text Document or right-click-Open With. Also, the keyboard shortcuts are a little hard to get used to. I'm sure I'll pick up some common Mac shortcuts as I get used to the operating system, but there are some things about Windows that I really love.

Like installers.

I started looking around for tips on installing and configuring PHP and MySQL on the Macintosh and ran straight into command line hell. I thought I left this behind in the '80s. ;-) One reason I've always hated working on Linux was trying to install/configure programs. I ended up installing the latest PHP and MySQL versions on my Mac using some installers rather than go through the whole command line hell. The PHP installer for 5.1.2 was found at http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/. The MySQL site has a Mac installer for the MySQL server. I haven't looked into an admin program for MySQL yet, so I did have to do a little command line acrobatics to create some users and set passwords, but everything is up and running now and working well. I installed Cartweaver PHP and had it working in a matter of minutes. The next step will be installing ColdFusion.

I was surprised to find that Microsoft has a remote desktop application for the Mac -- I loaded it in and was able to pull up my Windows 2003 server in full screen. I think with this capabililty I could easily get used to using a Mac.

I found a pretty good text editor called TextWrangler that seems to suit my needs, but I'd love to know if there are any better ones. Any suggestions? Also, does anyone know of a good book to get up to speed on all things Mac? I've used Macs many years ago, but I need a quick crash course in how to do common everyday things.