10 fundamental rules for the age of user experience technology:

1. More features isn’t better, it’s worse.
2. You can’t make things easier by adding to them.
3. Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.
4. Style matters
5. Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
6. Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.
7. Unused features are not only useless, they can slow you down and diminish ease of use
8. Users do not want to think about technology: what really counts is what it does for them.
9. Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user-experience.
10. Less is difficult, that’s why less is more

Consumer devices or frameworks, we are a product of our times.

Watch and contemplate.

I just want to point out that the Mac mini comes with Apache and PHP pre-installed.

If you want, compiling a new version of PHP on the Mac is pretty easy if you have ever compiled anything on unix. If you have trouble compiling PHP extensions on OS X its probably due to this bug, which has an easy work around. You can also download an OS X PHP binary.

Compiling MySQL is also easy, or you can download a binary. If your flavor is postgresSQL, then compile or download that, too.

Bare Bones just released a free version of TextWrangler. TextWrangler and its paid version, BBEdit, are superb text editors for PHP. The diff and grep (multi file) capabilities are very good. Open via FTP/SFTP is handy and it knows what to do with unix permissions. It does does syntax highlighting, is fast, and it stays out of the way.

The following shell command will cause TextWrangler to use php.net for the find in reference command:

defaults write com.barebones.textwrangler Services:ADCReferenceSearchTemplate "http://www.php.net/search.php?show=quickref&pattern=%@"

I understand you can also use PHP with Apple’s Dev Tools (XCode), but I don’t. XCode is free with OS X, but not installed by default.

OS X comes with CVS, too. Unfortunately, text wrangler doesn’t integrate with it as BBEdit and XCode do.

The Mac is a great PHP development platform.

I will end this evangelizing post with a pure marketing quote from the Apple site for the Mac mini:

Perfect for Programmers
Set a space-saving Mac mini atop your workstation PC and add a KVM switch to share keyboard, monitor and mouse. Mac OS X includes free developer tools for Mac, UNIX and Java. Test out a Mac version of your latest creation, instantly. Pretty soon you’ll be using the Mac full-time, with that PC relegated to the testbed.