Entries Tagged 'Mac / OS X' ↓

Call me a cynic, but “posts like this one on the Surfin’ Safari blog”:http://webkit.org/blog/130/css-transforms worry me a little. Let me explain…

I don’t know if anyone remembers back to the days of Netscape 4 and Explorer 3.5? – It was a time of table based layouts and browser sniffing. Each browser had it’s own “feature” set and this resulted in hacks galore, for example Netscape had “Layers” but Explorer didn’t, Explorer had feature X but Netscape didn’t.

Along came “Web Standards”:http://www.w3c.org and the likes of “Jeffrey Zeldman”:http://www.zeldman.com fighting for a standards based approach to web development. Over a decade on, it looks like were finally getting there as _even_ Microsoft _slowly_ start to get things right with IE7.

As cool as the “CSS Transform”:http://webkit.org/blog/130/css-transforms stuff looks, I can’t help but thing we’re stepping right back into 1995.

What does everyone else think?

John Nunemaker posted a handy tip on “setting up autotest to work with Growl”:http://railstips.org/2007/7/23/autotest-growl-pass-fail-notifications

I use this all the time now however I didn’t like the ugly smilies (call me shallow if you like). I used “Wolfgang Bartelme’s”:http://bartelme.at “Smily Devkit”:http://bartelme.at/journal/archive/smiley_devkit to make a couple of PNG’s slightly more pleasing to the eye.

p=. !http://thelucid.com/files/fail.png(Autotest Fail image)!
!http://thelucid.com/files/pending.png(Autotest Pending image)!
!http://thelucid.com/files/pass.png(Autotest Pass image)!

The zip file can be downloaded here: “autotest_images.zip”:http://thelucid.com/files/autotest_images.zip

*Update* 17-08-07: Added ‘pending’ image for RSpec as requested by Aslak Hellesoy

“SonicIQ”:http://www.soniciq.com are looking for a “Junior Ruby on Rails Developer”:http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/1203.

We are based in Bournemouth, Dorset, UK. Anyone interested in working professionally with Rails on some exciting projects please “drop us your CV”:http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/1203.

“Dan Benjamin”:http://hivelogic.com/authors/danbenjamin recently updated his very helpful article entitled “”Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X”:http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx”.

I don’t know about anyone else but compiling software is not one of my favourite pastimes. As I’ve been chopping and changing macs lately I thought I’d write a couple of shell scripts to get things right before running anything on my nice new (freshly installed) MacBook Pro.

h3. Prerequisites

There are a couple of prerequisites in addition to what’s on Dan’s “”What’s Needed”:http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx” list before running “the scripts”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/. The first is that you must have MySQL installed as referenced in “Dan’s article”:http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx, and the second being the following:

Ensure you have the following line at the end of your ~/.bash_login file:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"

You can add this by typing nano ~/.bash_login then copy and paste the above line into the end of the file. Once this is done, hit ctrl-x to exit, answering ‘y’ to “do you want to save changes” prompt.

h3. The scripts

There are two scripts, “01_osx_rails.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/01_osx_rails.sh and “02_osx_image_tools.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/02_osx_image_tools.sh and the following will explain how to use them.

h3. Creating your development environment

The first script will install everything in Dan’s article along with the following gems that I use frequently:
* rails version 1.1.6 for support of older rails apps
* bluecloth
* redcloth
* sqlite3-ruby
* ferret
* ZenTest
* redgreen

Right… here we go:

(please read “the licence”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/MIT-LICENCE before running these scripts as although they have been tested on a clean install of Tiger, I can’t take any responsibility if something breaks)
# Download “01_osx_rails.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/01_osx_rails.sh to your desktop
# If you don’t wish to install all of these gems then open the file in a text editor and comment out the relevant lines with a hash.
# Open a new terminal window and type the following:

cd ~/Desktop
sh 01_osx_rails.sh

# Go make a cup of tea and watch all the pretty text scroll before your eyes.

That’s it, you should now have a fully working development environment.

h3. Image tools

I use a couple of image tools on my system, GD and ImageMagick (with RMagick). If you wish to install these tools and the related libraries, run the following:

(This script hasn’t been tested as much as the previous one so use at your own risk. If anyone has any bug fixes then please post a comment)

cd ~/Desktop
sh 02_osx_image_tools.sh

h3. We’re done

Please let me know if I’ve missed anything obvious.

I hope this helps anyone else out there with Compilaphobia!