The canvas element in HTML5 is exciting because it really opens the doors to games, drawing, and animation. This is especially exciting as browsers hardware accelerate canvas and improve its performance. What isn't so exciting though is that you do have to do a lot more for yourself.
Most of the time, installing things with MacPorts is pretty easy; however, I have found that GNU Octave can be a little tricky. That being said, it's still pretty easy to get Octave up and running in both Snow Leopard and Lion.
I'm starting to use the closure library and all of it. The closure compiler is nice because it can compress your JS code down, a LOT. In order to get the biggest bang for your buck. you want to use the advanced optimization settings. It can eliminate unused code, inline functions, and rename variables.
So I'm all upgraded onto the new Snow Leopard and I wanted to see what ZendServer CE was all about. Well, unfortunately, when I try to run it, I see watchdog errors when I try to start the Java Bridge and Lighttpd. Some have updated the lighttpd service script to not use watchdog (which still hoses the JavaBridge), while others tried to create a new zend user. What worked for me was to replace the watchdog application. After doing that, everything worked fine and I didn't have to modify the lighttpd script or create a zend user.
I am a vim user. The thing I like about vim is it's speed, how universal it is, and it's customizations. These customizations can come in the form of plugins, syntax files, compilers, and code completion utilities; all of which are scripts. Scripts can be a single file like MiniBufExplorer or can encompass multiple files like vjde.