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Mac OS X

I’ve been interested in Macs for a long time, but only decided to buy one when I saw the first creating a blog in 15 minutes screencast that was put together to demonstrate Ruby on Rails. The screencast showcased the TextMate editor (which only runs on Mac OS), and I just had to try it out…

  1. 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.

    Read more about TextMate

Articles on Mac OS X

  1. Firefox buttons for Mac

    05 July 2010

    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.

    Download Mac toolbar buttons...

  2. Making gitk look sexy on Mac OS X

    26 June 2010

    Does your version of gitk look like Windows 95’s ugly step sister? Would you rather it used native buttons and widgets, and a half decent font?

    Continue reading

  3. Fixing the Xcode Project Templates

    02 January 2010

    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.

    Find out how to fix it

  4. Installing Nokogiri on Leopard

    07 October 2009

    Nokogiri complains that the version of libxml2 installed on Mac OS X Leopard is over 4 years out of date.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!

    Update your libxml2 library

  5. Installing the pg PostgreSQL gem on Mac

    10 June 2009

    You can connect to a PostgreSQL database from Ruby using the pg gem, but if the pg_config program 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…

    Compiling the pg gem

  6. Building do_mysql on a 64-bit Mac

    02 October 2008

    Whilst installing merb with edgy I’ve had run into some trouble building the do_mysql gem 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…

    Find out how to compile do_mysql

  7. Debugging JavaScript in WebKit

    02 October 2008

    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…

    Read about the JavaScript debugger

  8. Removing an entry from /etc/hosts on a Mac

    09 June 2008

    I was testing a freshly deployed web site for a client the other day before they’d setup their DNS entry, and added the server to my Mac’s /etc/hosts file. It looked something like this:

    208.75.85.73    www.clientsite.com

    When I’d finished my testing I removed the entry from /etc/hosts. On most Unix systems that’s enough to eradicate all traces of your meddling, but not on the Mac. Any IP address that you add to /etc/hosts gets cached by the operating system.

    After a bit of poking around I discovered lookupd. On Tiger you can flush the cache by entering this in the terminal:

    lookupd -flushcache

    On Leopard the lookupd command has been replaced with dscacheutil:

    dscacheutil -flushcache

    Update: The HostsWidget Dashboard widget appears to solve the same problem rather well.