The old mantra of “Think Different” used to mean one thing. However, it now means something very different in certain venues. I’ve noticed this trend growing steadily as I attend conferences, but I don’t think I’ve heard it as pronounced (at a non-apple specific meeting) as it was at this:

By our best estimates, over 90% of the 550 people at RailsConf 2006 are using Apple laptops.

We decided to reward those willing to take a stand against the norm and compute different.

See the Flickr Stream

I’ve been rapidly prototyping and developing a lot of Ruby on Rails applications. I don’t want to run lots of WebBrick servers, or configure lighty. I’d rather just use apache for local development, which is much quicker and doesn’t involve ports, and explicitly running stand-alone servers.

The instructions below are the quick, and bare-bones steps needed to get a rails app up for development on a Mac OS X machine.

Create your rails application

$ rails ~/Projects/myapp

Edit your apache config file

You need to setup your apache to know how to handle the /myapp URL request. Put the following at the bottom of your httpd.conf file.

/etc/httpd/httpd.conf

FastCgiServer /Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/dispatch.fcgi
    -idle-timeout 120 -initial-env RAILS_ENV=development -processes 1
Alias /myapp/ "/Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/"
Alias /myapp "/Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/"

<directory /Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/>
  Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride all
  Order allow, deny
  Allow from all
</directory>

Restart Apache

After you’ve edited the file, you need to restart apache:
$ sudo apachectl graceful

Set the rails base address

Now you need to let rails know what the base address is for the URL’s:
~/Projects/myapp/public/.htaccess

RewriteBase /myapp


Test that it works

Navigate your browser to http://localhost/myapp, and you should see the happy Welcome aboard

I recently recompiled and released DashSaver as a Universal Binary. It now will run fine on Intel and PowerPC computers.

Go give it a download. There are still two major feature requests:

1. Secure screensaver - when ‘Ask for password on wake’ is turned on, it will hide the dashboard
2. Dual Screens - the semi-transparent, colored background under DashSaver won’t show up on the second monitor

You can also catch a great audio review of DashSaver over at the MacReview Cast (mp3, it’s at the beginning, the first reviewed freeware app)

Expect more features coming up soon.

KDE, a desktop environment for Linux will support the HTML Canvas element in the next release (KDE 4). What does this mean to you, the user? The KDE Team’s goal is to run Apple Dashboard Widgets on Linux!

Widgets themselves are nothing special. Having developed one and dug through, modified, and working on more, they are just a collection of HTML and Javascript that happens to show up very nicely in a big dynamic webpage called Dashboard

This will be nice since currently only KonfabulatorYahoo! Widgets are cross-platform.

CocoaTech has released PathFinder 4, the ‘Finder replacement’ on Mac OS X (which is both hard since the Finder is baked into the OS and included, but easy since the Finder doesn’t really provide much actual UI). I haven’t used PathFinder much before, since it had publicly stangated on v3 and I am happy enough with the Finder and the awesome ability to press <Cmd>-<Shift>-G to bring up a tab-completing text entry for going to locations.

But what really impressed me was their new Open Source projects. Their open-sourcing their plugin-in interface, their internal and powerful frameworks, and CocoaTechTerminal which allows developers to put a terminal within an NSView in their applications.

A company with solid code, releasing parts of their code-base in open-source is unadulterated awesome and much to be applauded. I’m downloading PathFinder 4 just because of their open-source coolness and will give it a try and may purchase it.

Since I’m on the topic of people making very developer friendly add-ons, I recently came across John R Change Contributed projects, which include a better NSStream, a case-insensitive NSDictionary, a category of NSString that adds support for matching regular expressions, and other Cocoa add-ons and classes.

There are many, many more libraries out there. Just watch CocoaDev, a developer Wiki that is active (if sometimes chaotic) documentation, discussion, and resources on Cocoa libraries.