One of the changes that will impact you as a developer is that Apple switched the default shell from Bash to Zsh (Z shell). You can, of course, change it back to Bash, but I don’t mind Zsh (or Fish) so I decided to keep it.

I needed to install htmlbeautifier, a gem used by some prettifier extensions within Visual Studio Code. If you try it with the default system installation of Ruby, you’ll get a permission error:

$ gem install htmlbeautifier
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
    You don't have write permissions for the /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.6.0 directory.

At this point, you might be tempted to simply sudo it, but that’s not a smart approach. Instead, I like to have multiple versions through an environment management system such as rbenv or asdf.

For this particular machine, I picked rbenv. Unfortunately, following the usual setup instructions didn’t really work, so I’m sharing the setup that worked for me here.

I updated brew and used it to install rbenv and ruby-build. The latter allows us to select a series of Ruby versions to chose from.

$ brew update && brew install rbenv ruby-build

To ensure that rbenv is correctly loaded when we start a new shell, I had to edit a couple of files. I added the following line to .zshenv:

export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"

This adds gem-specific binaries to the PATH so that they are accessible to the shell without fully qualifying them with their path.

Then I added the following lines to .zshrc:

source $HOME/.zshenv
eval "$(rbenv init - zsh)"

This ensures that the previous file is sourced when a new session is started and that rbenv is initialized for Zsh.

At this point, you’ll want to source .zshrc (or simply restart the terminal of your choice like iTerm2, instead):

$ source ~/.zshrc

With rbenv ready to go, I installed the latest version of Ruby and set it as my global default for this machine.

You can determine the latest stable version by running:

$ rbenv install -l

Go ahead and run:

$ rbenv install 2.7.2
$ rbenv global 2.7.2

After restarting the terminal again, do a quick sanity test to ensure that the right version of Ruby is being selected:

$ ruby -v
ruby 2.7.2p137 (2020-10-01 revision 5445e04352) [x86_64-darwin20]

$ ruby -e "puts (1..100).reduce(:+)"
5050

Finally, you’ll be able to install htmlbeautifier, like I did:

$ gem install htmlbeautifier

No need for sudo.

I hope this helps anyone who is trying to install rbenv on zsh. It did the trick for me.

The post Installing rbenv on Zsh (on MacOS) appeared first on Programming Zen.

Productivity apps on my Mac

• Adium for communicating with my Gmail contacts.
• Skype for computer-to-computer calls and the occasional video conference.
• Google Hangouts for actual phone calls, video calls, and screen sharing.
• Sublime Text for general editing of text or programming languages that don’t have a dedicated IDE like Xcode or RubyMine.
• Byword for writing posts in markdown.[2] I bought the in-app option to publish to blogs and Evernote, as it’s handy in this respect (particularly for the latter). Yes, I could easily use Sublime Text for this, but I prefer the distraction-free approach of Byword when writing larger amounts of content.
• Apple Calendar synchronized with Google Calendar.
• Gmail on the web. I haven’t found a Mac email client I could love.
• Google Drive/Docs when sharing an article with my wife or friends, especially if I want to get feedback before publication. I also use it occasionally as a replacement for Excel/Form.
• Dropbox to synchronize key files between all of my devices.
• Evernote for note taking and bookmarking. I resisted Evernote for a long time, then one day, it suddenly clicked for me. I also have the Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome.
• The Doit.im Mac app which I use for my very loose version of GTD (Getting Things Done). This is essentially my TODO list app/service.
• Reeder 2 connected to my Feedly account, to stay abreast of noteworthy posts and news.
• TweetDeck to handle a few social media accounts.
• iTerm2 as a replacement of the stock Terminal app.
• Market Samurai for SEO and online marketing research.
• Screenflow for screencasting.
• Photoshop and Lightroom for photo editing and handling.
• iMovie for the occasional video editing not related to screencasting.
• 1Password synchronized via Dropbox so that I only ever have to remember one password.
• Skitch for screen grabbing and quick annotations. I particularly like the ability to share the screenshot with one click (when it works), and its integration with Evernote (being made by the same company).
• DragonDrop, a Mac utility that allows you to very quickly copy/move a series of files from one place on your filesystem to another.
• Pushbullet to send and receive SMS from my computer as well as handling my Android phone notifications.
• Keynote for the occasional presentation that is not work related (at work I use the Microsoft Powerpoint, which is provided to employees, or the open source equivalent of it).
• iPython as my calculator and quick data analysis tool.
• TeamViewer to remotely login into my other laptops.
• RescueTime, a recent addition, to keep track of my time, help with accountability, and generally motivating me to do more.

Productivity apps on my Android phone

On my giant smartphone (the Samsung Galaxy Note3) I use most of the same services and apps, provided an app for Android exists. So you’ll see me use Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive, Hangouts, Doit.im, et cetera, there as well.

The main noteworthy mentions are:

• Gmail as I find the app to be much better than the mobile site version.[3]
• Press as my feedreader client for Feedly, instead of Reeder.
• aCalendar+ as my Google Calendar client, instead of Calendar for Mac.
• buffer to schedule social media posts (on my Mac I also use buffer, but I do so from Chrome).
• Pocket casts to catch up with interesting podcasts such as Ask Altucher, The Tim Ferriss Show, Tropical MBA, and a dozen others.

Not everything on the Mac has a worthy equivalent on Android, so I don’t have a text editor to recommend here for example. On phones, I find that Google Drive, or any of the built-in editors capable of editing files that are stored in Dropbox, to be okay in a pinch.

Productivity apps for iOS

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently got a new iPad Air 2. It’s an entertainment device but I try to use it for productivity tasks as well. This will be the case all the more so once I get my hands on a decent keyboard case for it.

Much like my phone, where corresponding Mac apps exist for iOS, I use them. So Evernote, Dropbox, 1Password, and even Byword, are all installed there. One exception would be an RSS reader. Technically there is Reeder for the iPad, but I have been using the free version of FeeddlerRSS so far and find that it works well enough.

On top of the more or less cross-platform list, I have a few educational apps which are actually useful thanks to the iPad’s screen size:

• Udemy [4]
• Code School
• Kindle
• Safari Queue [5]

There are more applications, of course, but these are the ones that I use frequently and feel are worth mentioning. That said, this list is never static. For example, just a couple of days ago, while on Skype with my friend Kalid, he mentioned Beeminder to me, praising its accountability and goal tracking abilities. I had already come across it before, but overlooked it. Kalid swears by it, so I’m going to give it a shot.

Let me know what you use and would recommend. I love to check out cool applications and refine my toolkit and workflow as needed.

The post 40 productivity apps I use on a regular basis appeared first on Programming Zen.