Topic: Mac

Snow Leopard: the Obvious Choice

Ivan Moscoso, Wednesday, August 5, 2009 @ 11:00 am

When OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was released back in late 2007, I told a colleague at the time that Leopard was, by far, the worst release Apple ever put out. You can pardon a bit of hyperbole there, but after a healthy string of solid releases of OS X that just "worked", the problems produced by Leopard were numerous (one might counter that this is all relative-- four to five issues might not sound as numerous to users of other operating systems, but for OS X, these were a pretty big deal, and kept me from switching for months).

By comparison, Snow Leopard marks a great return to the kind of releases the Mac community came to expect. Yes we still have a month left to wait for its release, and yes there might always be small glitches, but as one long-time Mac user the answer to the question of "is it really all that?" the answer is pretty clear to me at least: "Yes, yes it totally is."
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Windows Development on a Mac

Jason Pearl, Tuesday, July 14, 2009 @ 10:58 am

I've been in just about the same cycle for almost 15 years now. Install Windows. Install the software I need on top of it. Wait about 6 months to a year until I can no longer take the gunk slowing down my system ("Windows Disease"). Backup my data. Format my drive. Rinse and repeat. Do this maybe 3 or 4 times, and then upgrade my hardware. Sound familiar?

So I got smarter. I started making images using Ghost. This has worked fairly well. I get a new system, I set it up as pristine and fully featured as possible, then I take an image of it. This way the install step takes a couple button presses, leaving me to do more useful things with my time. Like blog or something.

Fast forward a couple years. Processors are way faster and have more cores. Virtualization is no longer a toy, and can now be used not just for enterprise purposes, but on the desktop. Sure I'm mostly a Windows developer, but that doesn't mean I don't want to write iPhone / Mac applications. So after cursing my previous laptop up and down on a daily basis, I've upgraded to a MacBook Pro. It's tiny, it's fast, and it runs OS X and WINDOWS via VMWare Fusion. Windows runs spectacularly on my MacBook. The most beautiful part is, as far as I can tell, there is no parallel (no pun intended) to "Windows Disease" on a Mac. It has continued to run as fresh and fast as the day I installed the OS. Now with my backed up copy of my Windows virtual machine, starting from scratch on Windows is as simple as taking a fresh copy and spinning up the backup VM.

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Software Development

How to serve static websites and Passenger Rails projects from the same Mac OS X Apache instance

Brian Dillard, Monday, January 5, 2009 @ 2:22 pm

When your http://localhost/~username/ sites go haywire, it's time to dig into your Apache config files

As Rails pros know, Phusion Passenger allows you to serve multiple Rails apps on the same Apache webserver instance with few configuration or deployment headaches. When you install it in your local Mac dev environment, you can easily work on a bunch of Rails projects simultaneously without having to manually start and stop individual server instances all the time. The OS X Passenger preference pane makes deployment even easier. Just add a project, give it a custom local URL, and point it at a directory. You're good to go.

But what happens if you're already using OS X's built-in Apache webserver to dish up local content such as PHP applications or static HTML? When I first got Passenger up and running, all of my local sites in /Users/<username>/Sites/ stopped working. It took a bunch of digging, but I eventually realized that something in my Apache configuration had gotten messed up during the Passenger installation process. I was missing the configuration file for my OS X user account. OS X generates this file the first time you enable web sharing for any individual user. It's responsible for mapping your /Sites subdirectory to localhost URLs, so that http://localhost/~<username>/myapplication/ points to /Sites/myapplication/index.html.

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Software Development

Mouse wheel (scroll) Event in Flash Player running on a Mac

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, September 18, 2008 @ 1:04 pm

One of the great advantages of Flash technology is cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility. That is almost entirely true but a few things did slip Adobe.

A big issue that was overlooked is support for mouse wheel event on Mac OSX. A pretty basic functionality you would think. If your interface is heavily relying on mouse scrolling, your audience on Mac's will probably have a "so how does this work" blank stare.

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Software Development

Using Adobe Flex Builder 3 on a Mac

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, July 11, 2008 @ 4:44 pm

I've made a recent switch from Windows (Vista) to Mac (OS X 10.5.4). In these two months I had enough time to evaluate all biases that I was carrying with me for the past decade, including the one about coding on a Mac.

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Technologies and Platforms