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.

  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.

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Articles on Mac OS X

  3. Silky Markdown editing on Mac

    If you write in Markdown on a Mac you'll no doubt have dabbled with TextMate at some point. If you did, perhaps you discovered some of TextMate's marvellous Markdown mode commands, such as "Google for the highlighted text, and convert it to a link to the first search result" (if memory serves, it was Cmd-Alt-Ctrl-L)?

    Editor support like that makes writing in Markdown very productive, but these days I tend to pen my blog posts in simpler editors. Luckily, with Markdown Service Tools you can now setup similar keybindings that work in any app built on top of Cocoa (which is pretty much all of them).

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    Published on in Mac OS X

  5. 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/vi with any Ruby based plugins. MacVim (which includes Ruby support) normally runs with a GUI, but you can run it in a terminal when you type vi if you prefer.

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  6. 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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  7. 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.

    Read on if you want to poke MySQL with a pointy stick...

  8. 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.

    Download Mac toolbar buttons...

  10. 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.

    Find out how to fix it

    Published on in Mac OS X