I haven't yet switched to Java 6 as my default JRE but I will shortly. Happy to hear any early feedback from folks.
The review is interesting because it compares similar hardware (easier now Macs run on Intel chips) performing similar tasks. Leopard scored higher than Vista in usability and performance. Running Vista on Macs also scored higher in performance in almost all cases (than running Vista on PCs).
It's worth reading all four pages of the review and looking in detail at the specs - and the prices, which gives lie to the long-standing myth that Macs are more expensive. The laptops, whilst slightly different specs, are the same price and the Mac desktop is $300 cheaper than the similar Gateway used in the test.
The workaround is horribly painful and it took me a while to find it on various discussion forums. In essence, backup iCal, export each calendar, delete all your subscriptions (after recording the URLs!), delete ~/Library/Application Support/ical and ~/Library/Calendars (and maybe any iCal-related preferences), reset your sync history (in iSync), import the calendars back into iCal and re-subscribe to everything. Ta-da!
Mind you, while doing this, my mail accounts disappeared from iTunes for syncing. The fix for that is to modify a mail account configuration in Mail. That forces the mail accounts back into the iTunes sync list.
I'm posting these little notes in case they might help anyone else moving to Leopard (and as a testament to the fact that whilst I love Apple, I know not everything goes smoothly with a Mac - and this is why I held off upgrading for three months after buying the Leopard DVD!).
On the plus side, I really like the Leopard UI and I'm getting to like Spaces. I'm hoping I'll love Time Machine (when it finally finishes backing up my 120Gb of stuff).
I also took the opportunity to take .Mac for a test drive. Not sure whether I'll spend $100 a year on it but the whole "Back to my Mac" thing seems very cool...
So, why should you be careful about this? Because the Leopard upgrade kindly blows away your /home directory. Yup. There goes my ColdFusion install, there goes my Eclipse install and all my projects.
Backups? Fortunately, yes, I had a backup. Not a very up-to-date one, I'll admit (and I did toy with the idea of backing up my entire HD before upgrading to Leopard).
Fortunately, everything is under SVN so I just pulled out my old backup (and put it in /Developer this time) and then ran svn update on everything.
Other than that minor(!) trauma, the upgrade to Leopard seems to have gone well. I think.
Watch this space for more Leopard experiences.
Oh, and after all I've said about not upgrading early, why did I finally upgrade? Because, finally, everything I use on a day-to-day basis has been updated for Leopard. Or at least close enough to make the pain worthwhile. That and a new VPN client at work that is not compatible with Tiger.
I use Gmail a lot on my iPhone and one of my clients has standardized on Google Mail/Docs for their communications so I'm constantly reading mail and documents on my iPhone. Gmail was OK on the iPhone and Google Docs was bearable but Google Reader was a nightmare. At the weekend, I noticed Gmail suddenly got a lot nicer with a very iPhone-style UI, sliding panels between labels and mail. Great... now what about the other apps?
Tuesday night, I got home from said client's site and eagerly updated my iPhone firmware. The new "location" feature in the Maps application is very sweet (and seems sufficiently accurate for my needs). Then I started reorganizing my home screen. Screens. That's when I noticed that Google had updated most of its apps to be iPhone-friendly. Google Docs makes a great reader now, even for fairly large spreadsheets. Google Reader is a huge improvement!
So now my iPhone has:
- 43actions - a great little GTD (Getting Things Done) task manager
- Calculator
- Calendar
- Clock - with 10 cities
- Maps
- Notes
- Stocks
- Weather
- Google Docs
- Google Mail
- Google Reader
- Belfry Scientific Calculator
- My client's Google Docs
- My client's Google Mail
- ColdFusion 8 QuickDocs
- IMDB - I'm always looking up movies and actors so I need that accessible!
- Phone
- Safari
- Settings
- Bejeweled
- Code Breader - a simple take on "Mastermind", a childhood favorite
- InARow touch - aka "Connect 4", another childhood favorite
- Mahjong
- Camera
- iTunes
- iPod
- Photos
- Text
- YouTube
Anyway, a big thank you to Apple and Google (and those games companies) for making my iPhone an even more lovable and addictive little toy!
Smart woman, my wife!
So I just ordered Leopard, a car charger for my iPhone and a 750Gb USB 2.0 HD that I can stick on my Apple BaseStation as a network drive. 750Gb for just $230... amazing... and scary how cheap storage has become...
The question is: can I resist upgrading until all the software I use has been updated?
So I clicked the "Chat Now" link and got online with Lori. She informed me that the only way to buy these email gift certificates is to fire up iTunes and purchase them from the iTunes Music Store itself. Lori helpfully pointed out "iTunes is free"... So apparently Apple think that if you're buying music for someone, you'll download and install iTunes in order to do so. I can't say I'm very impressed with this change.
So why did I not pre-order Leopard and rush to install it?
Cop a load of this cover shot of MacWorld magazine with ColdFusion 8 on the free CD accompanying the magazine!! (via Andy Jarrett)
If you try to install CS3 for OS X when you have Safari 3 Beta installed, you'll hit an annoying problem.
Here's what happens. The install seems to go really well until you get to the end of disc one and then you get a blank alert box that you cannot interact with and you cannot quit the installer. You have to force quit the installer to get out of this situation.
Here's how to do it the right way. If you still have the Safari 3 Beta .dmg, mount it and run the uninstaller (if you don't have it, download the beta again from Apple's site). The uninstaller will remove Safari 3 Beta and restore your Safari 2 install. Now you can install CS3 without a problem. It takes up to two and a half hours depending on whether you install the entire suite or just select parts. It's huge.
Once you have successfully installed CS3, fire up the Safari 3 Beta installer again and you're back to where you started. No mess, no fuss.
Remember to run the updater - Help > Updates... from any program in the suite!
The Parallels Transporter is a very impressive way to import an entire PC - or even another virtual machine - into a new Parallels VM. I commented that I'd tweaked Vista pretty heavily to get it to perform well on Parallels so to compare apples to apples, I used the Transporter to import my VMware Vista image into Parallels and it worked flawlessly although Vista then insisted it was on new hardware and now it wants to be activated again (I went through this when I switched from Parallels to VMware - see my previous blog entry!).
Overall, Parallels is still the slicker product (now that Expose and interleaved windows are implemented) because the controls and preferences are more sophisticated and, if you need it, it has unlimited snapshot / restore functionality. The downsides are that the performance just isn't as tight and the 3D / graphics support is still lacking (the Vista Windows Experience Index process will not run at all on Parallels - it does run on VMware).
My only real complaint is that VMware Fusion has a small bug in the bridged network adapter that can cause Apple's AirPort card (in the laptop) to think it's being hit by a packet replay attack and it shuts the AirPort card down for 60 seconds. Nice bit of security but very frustrating when it's really just a bug in VMware's networking code. The other network adapter modes work fine but bridged seems to be the only way to be able to connect between the two sides and still access the big, bad Internet from both sides as well. I mostly just stay tethered to my ethernet cable when using VMware Fusion and I'm fine.
I hope that VMware add better DirectX support at some point so I can experience Vista in all its transparent-ness.
I have diligently stuck with NeoOffice/J - free, open source, open standards. It's a bit clunky but it works. I've used it for years. I helped (a little) with the Mac OS X port of OpenOffice.org back in the 1.0 and 1.1 days. I've always felt it's quirks are worth putting up with for the karma of Free Open Source and Standards.
I'm putting together my presentation for MAX and trying to work with Adobe's PowerPoint template. Someone really needs to teach those Adobe folk how to use PowerPoint! The template is horrific to work with and, unfortunately, exceeds the abilities of NeoOffice/J. It's all been very frustrating.
So, Apple released iWork 08 and it claims great Microsoft compatibility. Everyone is ooh-ing and aah-ing over the new features and the all-new Numbers spreadsheet. I'm thinking "yeah, whoop-di-do, another proprietary app".
Eventually... Well, I decide to at least download it and try it out. I open up Keynote and open up the Adobe PPT file. Perfect rendering. Wow! I create a few new slides and reorder them. Everything. Just. Works.
OK, I'm impressed... so I open up Numbers and bring in my invoicing spreadsheet. Ooooh, I think I'm going to faint! A spreadsheet actually looks attractive! And guess what? It. Just. Works.
Damn. I guess I'll be buying Apple's proprietary office suite after all. I'm stunned at how good it is. I love Free Open Source software and I'm willing to cut it a lot of slack but Apple has really hit the nail on the head here and the suite is definitely worth the $79 entry fee...
QS is actually a little hard to describe. At its core, it lets you navigate your Mac via the keyboard alone. You hit a hot key combination and start typing. QS displays matching files / applications and offers actions to take. A few keystrokes is enough to do pretty much anything to anything.
That description is woefully inadequate and you only really get a sense of the power of QS once you've been using it for a while. It can control iTunes without switching applications, it lets you navigate the filesystem, copy groups of files, search websites. It's incredibly flexible.
I've been happily running VMware Fusion for the last few days with Vista up pretty much continuously (14 hours, 21 minutes uptime currently) and I'm pleasantly surprised to report that I'm not hating Vista (I'm not loving it either but I'm definitely not hating it - even with UAC enabled!).
However, I still have Parallels installed (with my heavily tweaked install of Vista to try to eke some performance out of it) and that means that SmartSelect is active where you right-click on a Mac file and you can Open With... a Windows application fairly transparently. I just accidentally opened a PDF with Adobe Reader 8.1 - on Vista under Parallels! It took several minutes to stabilize but, sure enough, I now had two copies of Vista running side-by-side as well as all my Mac apps. Yikes!
I must get around to switching SmartSelect off or I'm going to do that again by accident. I'll probably keep Parallels around to see if they improve enough that I'll want to switch back to it but, right now, VMware Fusion is definitely my first choice for running Vista. Now, if they can just implement support for DirectX 9...
The download / install process was very simple and getting my Windows Vista DVD up and running was very smooth. Vista definitely seems to run better on VMware than the current build of Parallels. The user experience index values are higher in three of the five categories - 1.9 for general graphics, compared to 1.0 on Parallels, but still not enough to run the Aero look'n'feel unfortunately.
When Vista is "at rest", the host CPU is pretty minimal (around 5%) which is much better than under Parallels.
I have not had much luck with the "Unity" feature in VMware which is supposed to let Windows apps co-exist on the same desktop with Mac apps (I got that working) but the underlying file sharing / application transparency isn't as slick. On the other hand, Cmd-Tab and Expose work perfectly with VMware whereas they are suppressed under Parallels (or at least don't work properly on my system).
Overall tho', the performance boost alone may be sufficient to tempt me to buy a license of VMware and switch from Parallels.
What are your experiences with both products?
I just tried to delete a free song I'd downloaded from the store while it was playing. It asks if I want to delete it, I say yes. Then... it crashes. Oops! And it won't reopen either.
Since Apple application crashes can almost always be fixed by removing a plist preference file (in ~/Library/Preferences), I moved com.apple.iTunes.plist to the Desktop. iTunes would not restart. Hmm... So I sorted the Preferences folder by date modified. the recent item plist appeared at the top. I moved it to the Desktop and put my iTunes plist back. Success!
Once iTunes was restarted, I made sure I was not playing a song and then deleted the errant download. Success!
So, I lost my recent applications / documents list. That's no big deal - but it's an annoying edge case bug...
Oh, yes, I bought Vista Ultimate to run on Parallels. More on that in due course but, compared to Windows XP, it's dog slow and constantly chewing up CPU.
Checking the PostgreSQL site, I see no OS X distribution so I Google and find this Apple Developer Center article on PostgreSQL. My first reaction is "Oh, come on! There has to be an easier way!".
Brandon Harper pointed me at PostgreSQL Tools for MacOS X on SourceForge. I download the developer kit and the tools but the installation only seems to be partial so after half an hour of pfaffing around, I go back to Apple's page.
It actually wasn't as painful to get it all installed as it looked (I was just being lazy). So now I have PostgreSQL 8.2.4 running locally. Yay!
Any hints and tips for a new PostgreSQL user?
(click for bigger image)
Unsanity seem to be the company with the best tweaks so I just bought:
- ShapeShifter ($20) which applies new themes to your system. I'm currently running Cold 1.2 which I think gives the system a very clean but dramatic look to everything.
- FruitMenu ($10) which adds customizable cascading menus under your Apple menu and to your contextual menus in a number of applications. A very useful way to speed up navigation and access to commonly used files and programs.
- WindowShade X ($10) which introduces a number of different behaviors for double-clicking on the menu bar in a window. The classic WindowShade extension used to just roll the window up into the menu bar but this new version adds options to make windows transparent or minimize them to a series of "live" icons arranged around the screen.
If you buy more than one product, you get a dollar off each additional product which is a nice touch.
I also downloaded ClearDock which removes the background from the dock so your icons just float on the screen. I've always been bothered by that semi-transparent white background so it's good to get rid of it!
Unpack the MBP, plug it in, connect an ethernet cable, power up. The whole welcome experience is just so beautiful and warm and fuzzy that you instantly feel good - Apple have this so right!
Do you want to migrate files from another Mac? Yes. Connect the FireWite cable, restart the other Mac and hold down the T key. Continue. Transferring files. Time passes.
Up comes the new system, fully configured to exactly match the old system. Wow! That was easy. 60Gb+ of files and settings migrated without manual intervention.
It's not quite perfect. Apollo didn't migrate so I had to reinstall that. MySQL didn't migrate either so I just copied /usr/local manually from the old laptop. iCal crashed when it was opened. Odd. Ran a Software Update (to 10.4.9 plus a bunch of other stuff). iCal works just fine now. Parallels wouldn't start either so I had to reinstall that but all my VMs and settings were still intact. Everything else seems to be running just fine.
A very pleasant experience - thank you Apple!
I'd previously had Windows XP set to "Classic" mode but now I can have applications floating "loose" on the desktop next to OS X apps, it looks better in "Windows XP" mode with the silver theme. It also works better to have "Show window contents while dragging" enabled (otherwise when you move apps around you get an overlay of your Windows XP desktop wallpaper which looks very strange!).
p.s. You can now drag'n'drop files between the Finder and Windows Explorer - life just keeps getting better!
If you're a Mac user and you don't subscribe to Mac OS X Hints, you should!
Andy Jarrett just blogged about Desktop Manager and "Brad" recommended VirtueDesktops which I just installed and fell in love with! First off, it lets you bind application to certain desktops and automatically switch desktops when you switch applications - very, very nice! You can also get it to color-code the desktop image to match the virtual desktop - and have different desktop images on each of the virtual desktops.
I haven't (yet) figured out how to add new virtual desktops but so far I'm really liking VirtueDesktops!
Looks like ticket 171.
A bit of Googling discovered that Skype has an API that can be driven by AppleScript (and I knew iTunes could be driven by AppleScript) so all I needed was a way to run a script automatically every minute or so. I found Script Timer ($12) which can schedule scripts of all sorts, either by time or by interval or by certain events. Very nice.
And the AppleScript I wrote?
try
tell application "iTunes"
set trackName to name of current track
set trackArtist to artist of current track
set trackAlbum to album of current track
end tell
if not trackArtist = "" then
set trackArtist to " by " & trackArtist
end if
if not trackAlbum = "" then
set trackAlbum to " from " & trackAlbum
end if
set messageText to trackName & trackArtist & trackAlbum
end try
set commandText to "SET PROFILE MOOD_TEXT " & messageText
tell application "Skype"
send command commandText script name "test"
end tell
Thanx to Jim Collins for this link!
The P4 perspective in Eclipse is pretty good to work with and the plugin provides rich context menus for accessing most everything you need.
I got an email from Maxim today - he'd managed to get his disc out. He explained how and it also worked for me. If you can't get the disc out, try this:
Hold the laptop upside down, at a slight angle (with the CD slot pointing slightly down) and try to eject the CD... hopefully it should pop out without jamming.
When I examined the disc, it seemed to be slightly dish-shaped which might have caused the problem.
It's worth noting that last year's audio recording CD goes in and out of the slot just fine although Mac OS X thinks it's a blank DVD (so I can only read it on Windows XP, via Parallels Desktop).
I've heard good things about Navicat and I'm trying that now. It's great but... well... it's a hundred bucks! Sheesh. Is it really worth it?
I was pretty shocked to discover that OmniGraffle was no longer bundled with the MacBook Pro - and presumably no Intel-based 10.4.6 Macs... I was actually pretty annoyed, especially since the entry level OmniGraffle 4 Standard is nearly $80.
After only two weeks, I decided that I just couldn't live without OmniGraffle so today I bought my copy. I was tempted by the Pro version but wasn't sure the extra features were really worth the extra $70.
However, thanx to Stephen Collins, I now know about the "letterbox" extension to Apple Mail which provides an Outlook-style three-column layout. I'm going to try it for a while and see what I think.
Now that I'm running OS X and Windows XP side-by-side all the time, it actually improves productivity to have fewer differences between the two environments...
I've had the MacBook Pro for a week now and it's mostly set up how I want it so that I can be productive. I still have a bunch of configuration to do on it tho'...
I get to try out presenting on it for the first time next Wednesday (BACFUG, June 21st, Objects & Persistence). I already know that right now I have to run Breeze on Windows because the presenter add-in is not yet available for Intel-powered Macs (see this Tech Note for more details of Flash Player support for Intel-based Macs).
I have Windows XP installed for all my office-related processes (email, calendar, general documents etc) and Red Hat (RHEL4 AS) for a localhost deployment environment - and of course OS X for IM and general development.
Here's a screen shot of the three operating systems living happily side-by-side (click for larger):
Since I've setup the Windows XP system as my primary "work" system (for email etc), this works really well.
Connecting the host O/S to the VPN breaks the guest O/S network connection (just to further clarify).
The first thing I did was to install Parallels Desktop and get Windows XP SP2 installed and then Flex Builder 2 Beta 3 and a bunch of other stuff that will make life easier at Adobe (like many large corporations, several standard processes and systems work best when you are using Windows and sometimes Internet Explorer as well). Essentially I'm setting up a work world inside my main laptop world.
Parallels Desktop rocks! I'm using the free trial right now but I'll be buying my copy real soon. Very slick, great user interface and the only issue I've encountered so far is that the guest O/S can't access Adobe systems over VPN (which was a problem I had before with Virtual PC).
Windows XP does not rock. No surprise for anyone there - my dislike for Windows continues unabated after several reboots due to wave after wave of security updates.
The MacBook Pro? Well, it's a Mac and "It. Just. Works." of course. Is it fast? Yeah, I guess so. Does it run hot? Yup. I like the increased screen resolution (1440x900) over my 15" G4.
The downside, of course, is having to rebuild my "iWorld"... I always reinstall everything from scratch and just migrate data as needed to try to ensure I don't just copy old junk from my previous machine. I have basic email, chat and web browsing etc up and running but haven't started on my development environment (Eclipse).
If I encounter anything "cool" about the MacBook Pro, I'll blog about it :)
You can be sure that I'll be reporting my experiences with running ColdFusion MX and Flex Builder 2 on this setup... Oh and Apple has been trying to persuade me to take the Java 5 update and I've been putting it off because of reports of it breaking ColdFusion MX on some other people's PowerBooks...
If someone is kind enough to buy me one, I promise I'll figure out how to get CFMX running on it and blog about it. Until then, then entire subject of Intel-powered Mac is verboten.
Thank you.
This morning a customer IM'd me to say he had a similar problem with both the JRun and ColdFusion MX installers. Neither would launch when he double-clicked. He'd tried the installer on another Mac with the same result. He'd downloaded the installers again - still no joy.
Puzzled, I walked him through a whole series of diagnostics, comparing his installer to one on my machine (which had worked just fine). We couldn't see any significant differences. He had the right JVM. We were stumped.
So I pinged Mike Nimer who referred me to Farah Gron on the CF team. She recognized the symptoms and checked the bugbase for me.
It turns out there's a subtle issue with certain installers on Mac OS X. If the permissions end up being incorrect after you download the installer or you copy / move the installer around in certain ways, you can end up with a non-executable installer.
Fortunately, the fix is simple. First of all, diagnosis:
In a Terminal window, navigate to the directory containing your installer (probably on your desktop) and check the permissions on the installer executable that is inside the installer application:
ls -l cf_install.app/Contents/MacOS/cf_install
Now you should be able to double-click the installer in the Finder and all should be well!
We are excited to announce that this update includes support for Mac OS X as a new supported production platform for ColdFusion MX 7. For Mac OS X support, we included a new set of turnkey installers, similar to the Windows installers. As the OS X platform continues to gain traction in the industry, we are excited to see ColdFusion applications take advantage of the power on the OS X platform.I knew about the new OS X installer (it's very slick) but I didn't realize that 7.0.1 would bring official support as well! This is excellent news!
The new release has better Tiger compatibility, fixes for Jabber, ICQ, Yahoo! and miscellaneous other stuff. Read the announcement on the Fire forum for more details and download instructions.
That's the first failure I've ever encountered on a Mac in about 15 years of usage / ownership. Maybe I've been stunningly lucky?
So I'm back on my older 800MHz G4 laptop for the time being and currently copying across all the files I need from the newer laptop (as long as I don't breath on the new machine, it seems to stay awake).
If I'm a little slower to respond to something right now, it's because I'm busy rebuilding my dev environment - a lot changes in a few months so restoring this old G4 to the same state will take quite a few hours today...
Desktop Support fixed it. Or at least they and I think it's fixed. They did a hard reset of the PMU and now it seems to be behaving itself. We'll see. At least I know how to reset the PMU now.
Quite why the PMU would get itself in a knot, I don't know. After I'd posted the original entry, thinking it was a hardware error, I tried to login remotely and that made it sleep which pointed to a software problem after all...
It's good to be back up and running!
I don't hate Mail 2.0 but it sure takes some getting used to. The handshaking between Mail and iCal regarding events is pretty slick (although you no longer seem to have the option to not send a response email for each invite). For events that were imported from Panther, I've had to ask the originator to cancel and then re-invite me to some events because the old imported events were readonly and I couldn't detach and move events (some people move their regularly scheduled meetings around a lot!).
Spotlight is proving useful about once every day or two. Dashboard is subtly useful too. I used the flight tracker for the first time today. Nice. My widget for displaying active CFMX instances is useful... one day I might expend the effort to make it have buttons to stop / start instances etc.
Once again, I've changed my working practices somewhat. For some reason, the size / shape of Mail made me want to change the size / shape of several other apps so now I'm mostly using untabbed windows and relying on Exposé more than I was.
Eclipse is running fine on Java 5 although I have to switch the default JVM back to 1.4.2 if I want to start BlueDragon 6.2 since that does not support Java 5. CFMX / JRun automatically selects the 1.4.2 JVM so having Java 5 as the default doesn't bother CFMX / JRun.
I'm still not very excited about Tiger but it's not a bad upgrade.
I figured I could publish my calendars to get at the .ics files. iCal publishing supports .Mac and WebDAV. My ISP does not offer WebDAV. Hmm.
Guess I could enable WebDAV on my local Apache and publish to that, then use my old cron job to push the files from the webroot up to my ISP...
I found these articles about WebDAV on O'Reilly and WebDAV.org that helped me figure out most of it. I added a .htaccess file to Limit the WebDAV operations but couldn't write to the new WebDAV setup. Finder could connect, even prompting for the right credentials, but the folder was mounted readonly. Eventually I realized that the DAVLockDB directory path I'd specified didn't fully exist. A quick mkdir and a chmod and everything started working!
Now iCal happily publishes to my local Apache setup, my cron job pushes the files to my ISP and my wife can, once again, see what I'm doing.
It's the first time I've used WebDAV. It's pretty neat!
The new iCal is a bit odd too. They've moved around enough of the meeting invite stuff that I'm struggling to get used to it. The .ics file support is stronger but now I can't mess with an existing meeting that someone invited me to - previously I could add notes, detach / move the meeting etc. It seems to silently ignore updates to meetings that it migrated from Panther. Grr! I may have to delete a bunch of meetings and ask various people to re-invite me.
Having two different but similar look'n'feels for applications is disconcerting too. The brushed metal look is still there on the Finder and iCal but Mail's default Cocoa look has moved closer to the brushed metal look.
Safari's RSS just doesn't cut it. Lots of feeds out there have slightly malformed XML and Safari is too fussy. It can't subscribe to FullAsAGoog's blended feeds due to an XML error. Bah! But I'll soldier on with it as a default browser for a while to see whether it can tempt me away from Firefox (looking unlikely right now).
Dashboard is vaguely useful. I'm starting to experiment with building my own widgets. I may be more impressed with it then. So far I'm not having much success doing what I want.
Right now JRun seems to be running monstrously slowly on Tiger for no good reason I can fathom...
A reboot cured the JRun problem. Weird.
Installed Java 5.0 and made it my default JVM (yeah, I know, unsupported). JRun still uses 1.4.2 (no surprise there since it previously used 1.3 until Updater 4). Eclipse seems happy with Java 5.0 tho'... It's an interesting experiment!
Transmit didn't work either (SFTP failed) until I upgraded that to 3.2 (now comes with a Dashboard widget!).
So here is my version of Installing ColdFusion MX on Mac OS X.
Hope you find it useful. Let me know (in comments) if you have any difficulties with the instructions or any questions about it.
Note that I do not bother with the Apache connector for localhost development. Nor do the instructions talk about moving the webroot. The instructions will get you up and running - anything beyond that is a topic for another day!
Update: I've added information about the background startup shell script I use (and made it available as a download).
So what makes me excited about Tiger? Dashboard. I've been looking at Panic's Stattoo application that provides some useful 'instant information' and, ironically, I've assigned it to F12... which is what Dashboard uses. And Dashboard provides a similar function, but the widgets are interactive and... programmable by developers like me which is killer!
So, now I need to find out what the likely timeline and process is for upgrading machines at work! :)
Overall, I think that was the quickest, slickest, most comfortable purchase / registration process I've ever experienced for a small software utility.
As their tag line claims, I really think that Panic make shockingly good Mac software. So much so that I then checked all of their other products to see if I could buy something else from them. They're definitely interesting products.
I decided to download and try Stattoo which lets you put certain useful information pods on your desktop: next three events from a selected iCal calendar, weather, iTunes currently playing, new mail (you get from and subject) etc. I quickly customized it to show, left to right, weather at work, work calendar, to do list, home calendar, weather at home and iTunes. Normally it just acts as part of your desktop so you can see it when your desktop is visible or when you use Exposé to show it, but you can also assign a hot key to bring it to the front.
If I like it over the next week, I'll buy it (for $12.95 it is cheap). So a good user experience means repeat business!
What I like:
- Very nice Aqua user interface - very well designed
- Intuitive drag'n'drop upload / download and Finder-style 'favorites'
- Supports FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and various other protocols
- Dock icon acts as a drag target to automatically upload files dragged from specified local directories (probably the sweetest feature of the product!)
- Supports multiple connections in a tabbed browsing interface
Macromedia has provided all new installation instructions for CFMX 7 on JRun and Tomcat on Mac OS X. It omits the critical JRun 4 Updater 4 step but ought to be a lot easier to follow than the previous version. As always, feel free to contact me if you have problems getting it up and running on OS X and I'll pass your feedback on to the docs team (as well as helping you get up and running!).
Update: I blogged my version of the installation instructions in late April.
Via /. I saw this recent update to the timeline for Mac OS X ports of OpenOffice.org. No Aqua port so no native UI. Ever. That's a shame but it's understandable really.
The mention of NeoOffice/J led me to this downloads page (the main NeoOffice site appears to be down) so I decided to try the new 1.1 Beta with Patch 4. The install process is very smooth and the resulting UI is a big step up from the X11 version and the use of native fonts makes things look so much better.
Another benefit is that NeoOffice/J is based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 whereas the current X11 port for OS X is based on 1.1.2.
The first was SideTrack which allows your PowerBook's track pad to have scroll zones and programmable corner key taps. I've had something similar installed on various previous laptops but I've been without it for a while. Well worth the $15 to have scrolling and right-clicking all within single-digit reach!
The second was another tool from the same company, MenuMeters. As Sim says, it's good to get a bit more visual feedback about what your Mac is actually doing. Here's how I have mine set up:
First of all, a shell script to startup a CFMX instance:
JRUN_HOME="/home/jrun"
LOG_HOME="${JRUN_HOME}/logs"
if test x$1 = x
then
server=default
else
server=$1
fi
cd ${JRUN_HOME}/bin
./jrun -start ${server} \
1>$LOG_HOME/${server}-out.log 2>$LOG_HOME/${server}-err.log &
./cfmxstart blackstone
Here's a similar shell script to shutdown an instance:
JRUN_HOME="/home/jrun"
if test x$1 = x
then
server=default
else
server=$1
fi
cd ${JRUN_HOME}/bin
./jrun -stop ${server}
Great, now what about doing this through a double-clickable Mac application? AppleScript to the rescue. Here's a simple AppleScript to run the shell script we just created:
do shell script "/Users/scorfield/bin/cfmxstart " & text returned of the result
If you want to get adventurous, you could add Stop and Start buttons to the dialog and run the appropriate shell script. You could also change the icon to something more CF-y of course.
Also, if you create AppleScripts that don't have dialogs, you can use them as Startup Items to cause your CFMX instances to startup whenever you boot up your Mac!
I couldn't resist... here's an AppleScript that lets you start and stop servers:
display dialog "Manage which server instance?" buttons {"Cancel", "Start", "Stop"} default answer "default"
set response to result
set operation to button returned of response
set serverName to text returned of response
if operation is "Start" then
do shell script scriptStem & "start " & serverName
else if operation is "Stop" then
do shell script scriptStem & "stop " & serverName
end if
Oh, they've decoupled the weblog publishing mechanism so you can write your own adapter for whatever publishing system you use. Nice!
Once you've downloaded it, open up a Terminal window and run this command (assuming you picked the English version):
Before you start JRun, you probably need to edit the jvm.config file to add -Djava.awt.headless=true to the java.args= definition. If you don't have that, ColdFusion MX will not start!
Now you should be able to startup any of your server instances, using the standard jrun command and it will use the default 1.4.2 JVM instead of the 1.3.1 JVM. That means you no longer need to use the (unsupported) method of starting jrun.jar explicitly, previously mentioned on my blog and Christian's blog!
Firefox 1.0 has better tabbed browsing support but I still wanted more so I tried a SingleWindow extension that was supposed to be compatible but it didn't work too well either.
So now I'm running the raw 1.0 preview. It's not as good an experience for me as the 0.9 + tabbed browser but I'll deal.
I do like the RSS auto-discovery built-in and the "live bookmark" mechanism for displaying RSS feeds. It doesn't autodiscover my RSS feed tho'... at least not on the blog (it does on the rest of the site - go figure!).
The end result was that I exported all my Safari bookmarks (thanx to the Safari Bookmark Exporter) and imported them into Firefox and then I transferred all 110 RSS feeds from NetNewsWire to the Sage RSS / Atom feeder extension in Firefox! | Mozilla Firefox Extensions
But tonight I upgraded her machine too (yes, I bought another copy of Panther!). Why? Because Panther lets you search for text in directories full of PDF files from the Finder - she's working on her cat show judging exam (180 essay-style questions and six months to complete it!) and she needs to quickly search a lot of PDF-format reference material. Jaguar didn't cut it - it couldn't search PDFs and Preview - Apple's PDF viewer - didn't even have search! Panther makes it child's play. It just goes to show that not everyone is wowed by the same thing...
Mind you, I'd forgotten how interminable (but easy) the Panther upgrade is... I think I started at 9:30pm and didn't finish everything until midnight (including software updates). There's a reason I'm not in IT Operations / Support :)
It was not as easy to get that far as I'd hoped. A Mono developer said "Well, just pull the latest files from CVS" but what's in CVS differs from the packaged source files so you have to run an 'autogen.sh' script to create the 'configure' script. However, the mod_mono autogen.sh complains about a few things on Mac OS X and then the generated configure script fails with a syntax error (at line 18,817!). After struggling with the infrastructure for a while, I simply ran a diff across the mod_mono source code and then applied what looked like the necessary changes. Ack!
../socket2.c: In function `WSARecvFrom':
../socket2.c:853: error: `POLLRDNORM' undeclared (first use in this function)
../socket2.c:853: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
../socket2.c:853: error: for each function it appears in.)
make[2]: *** [socket2.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2 make: ***
[librotor_pal] Error 1
I'll provide another update when the doc gets a new, more permanent home.
