Since we have some new members in the team, it was time to grab some new Intel MacBooks. I also decided to switch and recycle my 12” PowerBook to another team member.

As usual the switch between Macs was reasonably painless - just connect the two laptops with a FireWire cable and wait. However, after the switch my DarwinPorts-built Midgard ceased to work.

I suspect this is because it was built on a PPC box and I’m now on Intel, but unfortunately today is not the best day for downloading Xcode as Apple servers are probably getting hammered during the WWDC keynote. I’ll make the recompile tomorrow and report how my development environment runs here.

As a summary, the development tools I use daily are:

• DarwinPorts package install of Midgard
• Subversion checkout of MidCOM
• Eclipse or SubEthaEdit for editing, a bit depending on situation
• Firefox and Firebug for testing AJAX stuff
• Phing and PEAR for packaging

In the other news, the GPGreasemonkey Summer of Code project sounds interesting. The aim there is to build a Firefox extension that would enable encrypting and decrypting parts of web pages using GPG. This would be very useful for Wikis and CMSs…

When you view a PGP encrypted message via your webmail account, GPGreasemonkey would detect the encrypted text, prompt for passphrases as needed, decrypt the message, and automagically display the unencrypted text.

Updated 2006-08-10: The MacBook was slightly painful to use with the default 512MB of RAM. Luckily GNT was able to deliver new 2GBs of memory ahead of schedule. Now the Mac feels like a completely different machine…