I’m a huge fan of Basecamp and have been a happy and productive basecamper for six months or so. My favourite feature has always been the To-Do list and now 37signals have released this as a separate app: Ta-da Lists. In their own words, “just what you need and nothing you don’t”. Best of all, it’s free.
This installer adds ActionScript syntax colouring and a Test Movie in Flash command to the awesome TextMate editor for Mac OS X. Test Movie in Flash works with .fla files added to your project (hit Cmd-Rtn with a .fla file selected), although at the moment TextMate displays binary files as text, which for a large file can be slow. Hopefully this issue will be dealt with in the upcoming 1.0.1.
The installer adds the bundle to /Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/. If you prefer to do it manually (if you want to put it in ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/ for example), download the bundle.
I wish I’d had the benefit of this article a few months back when I was setting up my Subversion server. Although the svn documentation is excellent, it’s good to see a Mac OS X specific tutorial.
Installing Subversion (plus dependencies) using DarwinPorts is really simple: just cd to your darwinports/dports/ directory and type sudo port install subversion +mod_dav_svn. Instructions on how to install DarwinPorts are here.
I put together a Subversion startup item (installed into /Library/StartUpItems/), although really this is just an Apache2 startup item, but I called it Subversion since that’s all I’m using Apache2 for. The script assumes you’ve installed Apache2 in /opt/local/apache2, and requires SVNSERVER=-YES- to be added to /etc/hostconfig.
Update: Apple has now has a useful article Getting Control with Subversion and Xcode detailing how to compile Subversion from source for use with the version of Apache2 shipped with Mac OS X Server, as well as how to install WebSVN, which offers as web-based “view onto your subversion repositories that’s been designed to reflect the Subversion methodology”. Although I’m not sure why an article about Subversion suggests downloading WebSVN rather than checking it out from the svn repository:
svn co http://guest:guest@websvn.tigris.org/svn/websvn/tags/1.61/ websvn
(New: see also ActionScript for TextMate)
I had this working previously in Project Builder, but the specification files were broken in Xcode. Thanks to the C# versions I found here, I’ve been able to update these for Xcode. This installer adds two files, ActionScript.pbfilespec and ActionScript.pblangspec to /Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Specifications, adding ActionScript syntax colouring and code completion (press opt-esc) to Xcode.
Personally, I now prefer to use SubEthaEdit as an external Xcode editor for ActionScript, as SubEthaEdit’s in-build ActionScript mode adds functions as well as classes to its symbols popup (Xcode can only see classes).
Just copy the unzipped ActionScript.mode file to SubEthaEdit’s internal Modes folder, either manually by control-clicking SubEthaEdit and choosing ‘Show Package Contents’, then copying the file to Contents/Resources/Modes (you might want to back up the old ActionScript.mode first) or with this script (assuming you unzipped the file to your desktop): mv ~/Desktop/ActionScript.mode /Applications/SubEthaEdit.app/Contents/Resources/Modes/ActionScript.mode
~/Library/Application Support/SubEthaEdit/Modes/
/Library/Application Support/SubEthaEdit/Modes/
/Network/Library/Application Support/SubEthaEdit/Modes/
Although one of the early Flex beta installers for Linux also worked on Mac OS X, this is no longer true for the 1.0 release version. However, this doesn’t mean it can’t be installed. All you need to do is extract the WAR files from the installer: unzip -d flex flex-10-lin.bin (extracting the contents of the archive to a new directory ‘flex’ in the working directory). These will be in the dist directory at flex/R_/dist. Each WAR file is a separate, stand-alone application, and should be installed on the server with its own directory structure and context. For example, to install the samples, extract the contents of this archive to JBoss’s deploy directory e.g. unzip -d /Library/JBoss/3.2/deploy/samples.war flex/R_/dist/samples.war.zip, then wait about a minute for the JBoss engine to do its thing before accessing the application: http://localhost:8080/samples.
The Flex trial CD can be ordered from the Macromedia store for $8.99.
/Macromedia/Flex), but otherwise the installer works as expected.If you’ve spent any time, as I have over the last year or so, working with Flash as the presentation layer for Java-based webapps, keeping as much of your ActionScript as possible in text files so that you can integrate these with your version control system along with your other source files, and wishing you didn’t have to use the Flash authoring tool to compile your movies, Flex (formerly Royale), a “standards-based programming methodology for building the presentation tier of Rich Internet Applications” from Macromedia (now in beta) might just be what you’re looking for.
