Adobe Air 2.0beta – No more Mac PPC Love
I was a little disappointed this morning when I read in the release notes for the new Adobe AIR 2.0beta version (released today).
Turns out that they've dropped support for PPC Macs. I'm not sure why they did this, but I'd speculate that it had to do with all the fancy new networking features.
This move is going to alienate a lot of users sill on older PPC hardware. It also makes it so that developers of extremely popular AIR applications (such as TweetDeck) won't want upgrade their apps to utilize these cool new features.
It's easy to upgrade software but extremely hard to upgrade hardware. Perhaps they'll add back PPC support in the final release build, but that's only wishful thinking.
Mac OS X Continually Amazes Me
One of our laser printers at work broke today (Error: 79.00FE) and a co-worker has about 20 documents in her queue to print to it.
Being that it's the day before Thanksgiving and there's only two Interactive/IT guys here I have to put on my IT hat and help out.
I installed a different printer onto her Mac and opened up the new printer's queue. On a whim and a prayer (I never in a million years expected this to work), I clicked a document from the broken printer's queue and dragged it to the new printer's window.
I think my heart skipped a beat when the new printer's window highlighted its border in blue, the way Mac windows react when things can be dragged to that space. I dropped the item into the new queue and the newly installed printer down the hall spun into action.
After a select-all and another drag/drop, all the printer items going to the broken printer were in line to print on the new one.
I'm really impressed because I didn't think that the printer windows would allow that.
Apple, you continue to impress me.
Bonus points to the first commenter to point out how many times the word "queue" is in this post! 
Aptana Studio: My New IDE
I've been looking for something to replace the "kludgyness" of Dreamweaver for a while now and I've always shied away from Java applications. However, there are not a lot of great powerful development platforms for the Mac. Sure, there's Coda, and TextMate, both of which are great applications in their own right. But I wanted something more.
Here is my list of things on my wish list for a web development IDE:
- Seamless FTP Integration
- Seamless SVN Integration
- Project and file management
- Code Assist
Lo and behold, I found Aptana Studio 1.1!
Yes, it is a java application, but it's based on the Eclipse IDE which is a very full-featured and mature open source project.
The interface can be a bit intimidating at times until you learn what things are called and how to interact with the application.
Aptana Studio does everything in my list and more. One thing I really enjoy is the real time PHP debugging. You're writing some code and in a "validation" window below the text editor will tell you immediately if you have a syntax error. Brilliant!
Another nice feature is that I can browse my SVN repositories right from the main window. Right click on a directory and check it out of SVN as a new project in Aptana Studio. Aptana keeps track of your changes and marks changed files with an * and files not in the repository with a ?. It supports synchronize, commit, update, create patch, apply patch, branch/tag, merge, show history, cleanup, and most important: diff. I think it's SVN support is the Subclipse plugin for Eclipse.
I've been using this software for about 2 weeks now and It has completely replaced Dreamweaver for me. The only time I've opened Dreamweaver was to grab some FTP settings that were stored there.
One thing I've noticed with Aptana is that is doesn't play well with the Mac OS X Dock. It happily shows up there when launched, but when you try to retain its icon in the dock after closing, the icon turns into a unix executable icon and is linked to "/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/A/Commands/java". That is very strange behavior. There's even a bunch of open bug reports about this problem specifically.
One way around this, annoying as it may be, was to create an alias of the launching application and put the alias in the dock. Only problem with that is when Aptana Studio is launched there are two icons in the dock. Not a big deal to me till the bug gets fixed.
Overall I'm really enjoying my new development IDE. It launches fast on my Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo and has a snappy interface. I just wish there was an option to "automatically upload on save" like Dreamweaver had. I'm willing to overlook that one shortcoming and work happily in Aptana, but I have a big sign above my monitor that says,
"Upload the file! CMD+SHIFT+U"
If you're tired of Dreamweaver, give Aptana Studio a try.
Word:COPY > Dreamweaver:PASTE Doesn’t Work!
Apparently it's a known problem on the Mac with Word 2008 and Dreamweaver CS3.
I can not copy (CMD+C) from Word and paste (CMD+V) into Dreamweaver. It's frustratingly annoying.
Two solutions:
- Keep TextEdit.app open and copy from Word to TextEdit, select all, copy from TextEdit to Dreamweaver
- Select text in Word and drag it into Dreamweaver
Way to screw up my work flow, Adobe and Microsoft.
UPDATE (17 June, 2008 at 09:52) - Some more weirdness: When i create a text element in Fireworks and copy text from Word and try to paste, the new text element is deselected (thus destroying it) and a bitmap image of the text is pasted in. Something is definitely rotten in Denmark (or Redmond/San Jose as the case may be).
Blog Software Update and a New Look (Update)
I've updated my WordPress blog to the latest version (2.5) and applied a new 2.5-friendly theme.
Just thought I'd let everyone know!
Thanks for reading and bearing with me while I fix functional and graphical quirks!
Update:
Well, It looks like the upgrade ate a few things. Mostly table elements in my posts. I'm going to try and restore the content into the new versnio from a database backup (Thank GOD for backups!).
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Nike+ Running Stats
- Total runs: 169
- Total distance: 298.44mi
- Total time: 86hr 53min 47sec
- Total calories: 39,935
- Avg pace per mi: 17'28"
- Avg distance per run: 1.77mi
- Avg calories per run: 236.30
My Records
- Farthest Run: 6.43mi
- Fastest Mile: 8'40"
- Fastest 5K: 32'10"
- Fastest 10K:2hr 16min 12sec
My Recent Runs
- June 1, 2010, 11:39pm
- Distance: 2.20mi
- Duration: 41' 12"
- Calories: 279
- May 27, 2010, 9:59pm
- Distance: 1.16mi
- Duration: 19' 44"
- Calories: 146
- May 10, 2010, 10:56pm
- Distance: 0.67mi
- Duration: 10' 57"
- Calories: 85
My Nike+ Goals
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