Mac OS X
I bought my first Mac after I saw the first creating a blog in 15 minutes screencast that was used to demonstrate Ruby on Rails. TextMate featured heavily in that video, and I just had to try it out...
I've since lost count of the number of Apple products I've brought home. Damn it.
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TextMate
TextMate is ideally suited to the agile web developer, and is very easy to extend with your scripting language of choice. It's especially popular in the Ruby community, and is (credit where it's due) the only reason that I switched from Linux to Macs several years ago.
Articles on Mac OS X
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Showing your laptop battery status in tmux
You can configure the tmux status bar to show pretty much anything you like. To include your laptop battery's current charge, all you need to do is to write a script that prints your current charge level.
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Running MacVim in your terminal
A recent version of Vim comes with every copy of Mac OS X. When Apple compiled it they didn't link it against Ruby, which means that you can't use
/usr/bin/viwith any Ruby based plugins. MacVim (which includes Ruby support) normally runs with a GUI, but you can run it in a terminal when you typeviif you prefer. -
Is Apple hardware suitable for the enterprise?
I recently had to make a trip to Apple's genius bar to get technical support on a faulty cinema display. While interacting with Apple's support staff (both at the genius bar and on the telephone) I realised that Apple are not able to provide adequate support to business customers. Update: They can do it, but don't advertise it well. Check the comments...
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Downgrading MySQL on Mac OS X
The MySQL installation packages for Mac OS X (on mysql.com) prevent you from downgrading MySQL. They keep track of which versions have been previously installed, and then make the brain dead assumption that you will only ever need to upgrade. It's farcical; even if you remove all copies of MySQL the installer still prevents you from installing an earlier version, unless you know where the silly buggers squirrelled away their nuts.
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Firefox buttons for Mac
When developing Firefox extensions that add buttons to the Firefox toolbar, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Firefox would provide a default button image for you to build upon, allowing you to layer your button's icon over the top.
Well you'd be wrong. But worry not -- I've made some blank Mac toolbar buttons that you can download and use.
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Making gitk look sexy on Mac OS X
Does your version of
gitklook like Windows 95's ugly step sister? Would you rather it used native buttons and widgets, and a half decent font? -
Fixing the Xcode Project Templates
I recently upgraded my copy of Xcode and installed the iPhone SDK. A short while later, while following an example in the Pragmatic Programmer's Cocoa Programming book, I found that my copy of Xcode wasn't creating some key files.
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Installing Nokogiri on Leopard
Nokogiri complains that the version of libxml2 installed on Mac OS X Leopard is over 4 years out of date. Well we can't have that now can we!
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Installing the pg PostgreSQL gem on Mac OS X
You can connect to a PostgreSQL database from Ruby using the
pggem, but if thepg_configprogram isn't in your path you'll run into problems during installation.This article is mainly here to provide some Google juice for those who hit the same problem...
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Building do_mysql on a 64-bit Mac
Whilst installing merb with edgy I've had run into some trouble building the
do_mysqlgem on my Macbook Pro. It's a 64-bit machine, so I installed the 64-bit version of MySQL, and that was my first mistake… -
Debugging JavaScript in WebKit
If you do much web development you're probably a big fan of the Firebug plugin for Firefox. It really is a rare gem in the web developer's arsenal. When I'm not developing I prefer to use Safari -- it seems faster and leaner, so I often find that I've got both browsers open at once.
A couple of days ago something rather fantastic happened -- Safari got a makeover...
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Removing an entry from /etc/hosts on a Mac
