Shaun McDonald's Blog » Mac OS X

SOTM 2010 Dashboard Countdown

smsm1986 — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 10:35:35 +0000

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.

Installing ImageMagick on Snow Leopard (64-bit)

smsm1986 — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:36:48 +0000

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"

SOTM2009 Countdown Dashboard Widget

smsm1986 — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:04:19 +0000

[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

Device Removal

smsm1986 — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:21:00 +0000

I don’t touch anything, and my slow first generation MacBook will randomly come up with the above message. Maybe an uptime of 13 days is the cause?

It is about time I rebooted into Kubuntu to get some updated maps on to my phone for TMJ. There has some considerable improvements in the maps in Edinburgh, and I don’t know what actually needs to be mapped when I’m out in the field.

OOO: Possible fix for the command timed out error on Leopard

smsm1986 — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:58:00 +0000

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.

—

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.

The following change should work for 2.4, 2.3.1, 2.3, and possibly earlier versions. Open the file OpenOffice.org 2.4.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/main.scpt in “Script Editor”. (You will need to control+click the application icon and choose “Show Package Contents”.)

Then replace the code block “on openSoffice(aFile)“….”end openSoffice” with the following:

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

Please comment on how this works for you.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Mac OS X [Update: now available]

smsm1986 — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:49:00 +0000

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.

Until then the new smart download pages will continue to give the link to the 2.4.0 build which isn’t yet available.

UPDATE: OpenOffice.org X11 2.4.0 for both Mac OS X 10.4/10.5 PPC and Intel are now available from the Mac Porting Download pages.

New OpenOffice.org Aqua Development Release

smsm1986 — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:23:00 +0000

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

This is the most stable build of OpenOffice.org running natively on Mac OS X that I have seen. I haven’t yet had a crash with my basic usage. Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5 is required.

The improvements include:

Printing now uses an aqua native print dialog
Various bugs, crashes, performance, and cosmetic improvements
The native file picker should work now (though there are 2 unlabeled checkboxes)
The QuickStarter is now supported on Mac OS X
Copy and Paste now works in the Hyperlink dialog
Icons are no longer shown in the menus by default on Mac OS X
Extentions can now be installed through the GUI
Improved scrolling when using a scroll wheel
Real version number is shown in the Mac OS X Finder’s Get Info Window.
The recent items list in the Apple menu is now populated
Faster loading and saving of files
New Start Centre

The downloads are on the extended mirror network, and BitTorrent. Please don’tdirectly link to any of the mirrors, please link to the OpenOffice.org Aqua download page instead.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 (X11), is currently in testing. OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be Aqua only.

Full News Release

OpenOffice.org Aqua Download Page

BBC’s iPlayer now compatible with Mac OS X

smsm1986 — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:34:00 +0000

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.

Some video items come up with:

” is not available to play here.”

with no explanation as to why. Maybe some videos are not updated to the adobe flash video type.

Now I’d like to get an improvement to Space, that will allow me to make a window in any application to be front most and move between space as required. That way when I’m playing a video the window will always show. Another problem that I have found with spaces is that when switching apps with command+tab or clicking the icon in the dock, a random window usually comes forward.

OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X Leopard

smsm1986 — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 07:40:00 +0000

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

OpenOffice.org, with the exception of the Java features will work on Leopard. If you require the Java features of OpenOffice.org on Leopard, you require to use milestone m237 or later.

The problem essentially boils down to the way that OpenOffice.org detects Java, and the fact that “Apple Computer Inc.” is NOT the same as “Apple Inc.”. (There are a few other build issues too.)

Thanks should go to Florian, Philip and Eric Bachard for their work on this issue.

Clean re-install of Mac OS X

smsm1986 — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 22:06:00 +0000

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.

It is now a lot faster as I don’t have any junk lying around running in the background. That’s one problem of installing various bits of software to see what it does and then not using it again. Maybe I should unsubscribe from the VersionTracker daily mail of new software releases. I’ve also gained around 20GB on my internal hard drive.

Of course prior to the clean re-install, I had create a complete bootable backup of my hard drive, thus allowing me to selectively recover anything that I need.

I should now be able to use the OpenOffice.org CWS tools again as I’ll setup my local cvs server on a different port than the default port.