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Leopard comes with Rails, but I prefer to roll my own in an effort to keep my environment stable. As always Hivelogic has the goods:

• Installing Ruby, Rubygems, Rails, and Mongrel on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
• Special bonus: Why not install the latest copy of Subversion? This was written a while back, I followed the directions but went for version 1.4.6 rather than the one referenced on Hivelogic. You might get an error message when compiling, if so, follow the instructions in the comments.

I upgraded my Mac Book to 10.5.2 today. Everything went swimmingly, but I noticed that everyone I know had suddenly moved their birthday to Wednesday the 13th at 15:00 EST–according to my calendar anyway.

My fix for this was to go into the iCal preferences and uncheck the Show Birthdays Calendar checkbox, then recheck it. This put everybody’s birthday back where it was supposed to be.

Update 2008-05-29: This birthday calendar weirdness happened again with the 10.5.3 update. Although, only three birthdays got screwed up. Once again, unchecking and then checking the Show Birthdays Calendar fixed the calendars.

NetNewsWire and NewsGator’s other client products are now free. Well, almost free. You’ll have to give up some attention data, but that’s not so bad is it?

I had a minor hiccup upgrading to the 3.1 version. This was because I had been using NewNewsWire Lite version. When I tried to launch NetNewsWire 3.1, it failed (crash report details below).

Update from the comments: Brent is on the case and has posted a new build to fix this first-run issue. See his comment below for more information and the link. Thanks for the quick response Brent!

If you encounter the same problem, this is what worked for me: Move the ~Library/Preferences/com.ranchero.NetNewsWire.plist file to the desktop. After doing this, NetNewsWire should launch without issue and the preferences file will be recreated. If this works, you can trash the old file that was moved to the desktop.


Process: NetNewsWire [917]
Path: /Applications/NetNewsWire.app/Contents/MacOS/NetNewsWire
Identifier: com.ranchero.NetNewsWire
Version: 3.1 (1200)
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [116]

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -[NSCFString timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x515990'


via The Unofficial Apple Weblog

The more miserable the weather, the more extreme the current-weather graphics seem to get on Apple’s weather widget. It’s sleeting here now. Check out the graphic below, it’s so much more exciting than the partly-cloudy image.

Update: Here’s a nice weather widget hack that adds the last time the weather information was updated to the widget.

Recently, I discovered that one can hold a window while switching Spaces in Leopard. The window can then be dropped onto any other space. This, of course, isn’t the only way to move a window to another space. But, I like this better than dragging windows off the screen.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Grab the window you wish to move by clicking and holding with the mouse.
2. Switch spaces directly (default: ^ Number Key) or with the arrow keys (default: ^ Arrow Key).
3. Drop the window on the desired space.

The movie below shows these steps in action. On my keyboard, using the arrow keys to switch spaces is cumbersome, so I usually use the ^ Number Key combination to switch directly to the space I want.

If you can’t see the movie above, you can download the Quicktime file directly.

For more tips, take a look at this Spaces tips screencast (the production values are much higher than my Quicktime movie).

Dan Benjamin at Hivelogic has some excellent guides for setting up all sorts of things on a Mac that relate to Rails development. His guide to installing MySQL on OSX is no exception. It takes you through the steps of downloading, compiling and installing the MySQL source code on your local machine. If you want MySQL on Leopard, this is probably the best way to go. There currently is no installer package for Leopard and while there is a package for Tiger, it is not without issues. Besides, it’s so much more fun to compile from source.

Now that Leopard has been released, I’m going to order a new Macbook. Sorry PowerBook G4, you’ve served me well for many years, but its time for an upgrade.

As part of the upgrade, I took a quick inventory of the applications I use. In addition to the built-in apps such as Address Book, iCal, Mail and iTunes, there are several applications that have become necessities for me. When the new Mac shows up, I’ll be busy downloading and installing these popular applications:

• Adium
• CocoaMySQL
• Colloquy
• Firefox
• Growl and GrowlTunes
• NetNewsWire currently using an old version (2.0.1), will try the lite (free) version
• Quicksilver
• TextExpander
• TextMate and the Vibrant Ink Theme

Ruby on Rails is bundled with 10.5, so I don’t think there is much to do there–other than move my Rails projects. iTerm is nice when working on Rails, but it no longer seems necessary since Terminal is tabbed now.

I’ve been using Microsoft Office X since I’ve had the PowerBook and have very few complaints about it. So, I’ll probably stick with MS Office rather than spend the extra $79 on Apple’s iWork. I’m less positive about the other Microsoft product I use regularly, Virtual PC. There are one or two applications I need to run that have no Mac equivalent. Using Virtual PC has always been painfully slow for me. While Virtual PC will run better on a faster machine with more memory, Microsoft is no longer upgrading the product, so I think it is time to try something else. I’ll probably purchase Parallels or VMware Fusion as a replacement.

This list of applications was longer than expected and I’m sure I’ve missed a couple. I’ll update this post when I find out what those missing applications are. This will undoubtedly happen while I am franticly trying to complete a task on the new computer without the proper tool installed.

So it’s Leopard Day. The official release is at 18:00 EDT, but mail order copies of Leopard have started arriving on desks around the world. There will be a sharp drop in productivity today as Mac fans upgrade their operating systems. If you are ready to upgrade, you might think about going for a clean install, it will be almost like getting a new Mac.

If you’re not quite ready to upgrade, check out, The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s 24 hours of Leopard, TUAW’s favorite new Leopard features–in 24 parts. If those shiny, new features don’t encourage you to loiter at the Apple Store tonight, I don’t know what will.

Photo by Obi Juan Kenobi

The mouse and other pointing devices are great innovations for personal computing. Excessive use, however, can really slow you down. Since I’m not a fan of deceleration, I’ve been loving Quicksilver lately. Other Quicksilver users I’ve talked to share the same feeling. In addition to giving you quick, keyboard access to applications and files, it can do more advanced actions like providing speedy access to contacts in your address book. Many of these advanced actions are provided through a growing library of plugins. Applescripts can also be run with the tap of a couple keys. This makes Quicksilver exceedingly flexible. As a simple example, I made this basic Applescript that launches my most used applications in one go.

Unfortunately, Windows users are out of luck, Quicksilver is Mac only. But, there are alternatives. Launchy is quite popular and Lifehacker points to a promising alternative called Skylight. I don’t have any first hand experience with either of these Windows applications, but if they share at least some of Quicksilver’s features, I recommend trying them out.

Well, it might not quake, but it can certainly do other things, providing you have some form of bluetooth device on you. Jesse David Hollington describes how to set up bluetooth proximity detection on a Mac. This allows one to execute an Applescript when a certain bluetooth device (like a phone) is within range and another script when the device is out of range. Jesse provides some scripts that inactivate/activate the screen saver and run isync among other things.

I simply pause iTunes when my phone goes out of range and play when the phone is back in range. Very nice.

This all relies on Proximity 1.0 to do the actual bluetooth detection. The system requirements for Proximity 1.0 state that it needs OS X 10.4 or higher, but it is working fine for me under 10.3.9.

via lifehacker