Shaun McDonald's Blog

As in the past couple of years I’ve made a Mac OS X Dashboard widget to count down to the State of the Map conference 2010.

SOTM 2010 Dashboard Widget and the Dashcode project source.

This blog post is only relevant if you are on Snow Leopard, have a 64-bit Intel Mac, and need to install ImageMagick.

There are many Ruby on Rails projects out there that have some form image manipulation, thus use ImageMagick for that. Up until recently it was a real pain to install, with some huge list of library dependancies that need to be downloaded, compiled and installed. The ImageMagick project is now supplying a Intel 64-bit binary, specifically for Snow Leopard user so that they don’t need to install from source.

Another nice little tips that I learned for installing gems that have native extentions, is that you can put the ARCHFLAGS environment variable into your ~/.profile so that you don’t have to manually set it (and then wonder why the gem doesn’t compile elsewhere). You need to add:

export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64"

[For the Mac OS X users, who are going to this year's State of the Map]

Screenshot of the SOTM2009 Countdown Dashboard Widget

I have updated the Dashboard widget I created last year for this years conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

I’ve added a donate button on the back that takes you to http://donate.openstreetmap.org/.

Dashboard Widget 163KB zip

Project Source Code 880KB zip

UPDATE:Thanks to Eric Bachard, a fix very similar to this will be appearing in OpenOffice.org 2.4.2 due to be released at the end of October 2008.

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With a change in the way that X11 works on Leopard, the X11 version of OpenOffice.org has been giving an error message on startup saying “command timed out”. With previous versions of Mac OS X, OpenOffice.org had to make sure that X11 was running first be trying to start OpenOffice.org.

on openSoffice(aFile)

 if (atLeastOSXVersion(10, 5, 0)) then  

-- if we have leopard, we don't need to manually start the X server first

  set theCmd to "sh " & (quoted form of (POSIX path of getOOProgramPath() & "soffice")) & " "

  do shell script theCmd & aFile & shellTerminator()

 else

  set theDisplay to startXServer()

  if (theDisplay is equal to "error") then

   return

  end if

  set theEnv to "DISPLAY=" & theDisplay & " ; export DISPLAY; "

  set theCmd to "sh " & (quoted form of (POSIX path of getOOProgramPath() & "soffice")) & " "

  do shell script theEnv & theCmd & aFile & shellTerminator()

  -- logEvent("open CMD: " & theEnv & theCmd & aFile)

 end if

end openSoffice

The release of OpenOffice.org 2.4 (X11 version) is a little behind the other platforms due to a lack of resources in the QA process, as many of the resources have been placed on the upcoming aqua version. It will be another few days to week before they are available on the mirrors and the Mac Port download pages will be updated at that point.

Head over to the OpenOffice.org Mac Porting web site for the latest development build.

After reading a macnn article. I have now found out that the BBC’s Player is now supported on Mac OS X. It is great that I can now watch BBC content from within Safari. The player only has a short buffer, though you can jump to any part of the video and it will start playing from there with very little delay. You have to remember that I have an internet connection of about 7Mbit downstream and around 0.8Mbit upstream. Therefore I don’t know how people on slower connections will manage.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was launched by Apple Inc. about one month ago.

Today I have spent some time re-installing Mac OS X on my MacBook. It has been over a year now since I have bought the MacBook, and have only once done a clean install on it so far.