I’ve been using Dashcode for the last two weeks or so while creating my Build Status Monitor widget. First impressions are not too bad. As IDE’s go, it does the job. You can write your html, css and javascript, all in one place, there’s a wysiwyg view, that’s all to be expected. To be honest I thought the code view could have done with better syntax highlighting, I found myself yearning for TextMate or Coda at times.

The winning feature for me though was the debugging facility. I found it to be extremely efficient, I’m sure I saved hours as it reliably showed me where the problems were in my code, allowing me to jump in at the offending line. When I’m developing for the web I can’t live without Firebug, when it comes to Dashboard widget development, Dashcode’s debugging abilities were a pleasure to use.

Deploying a widget couldn’t have been simpler. File > Deploy Widget, File > Deploy Widget to Dashboard. I did see one issue where I tried deploying the widget to my Dashboard at work and the widget simply wouldn’t initialise. All I saw was the default widget image. However I deployed the same code at home and the widget worked fine. I’ve installed that same widget in work now and I have no trouble with it now. I can’t figure out what the problem was. Perhaps all I needed was a restart.

Anyway, thats my Dashcode lowdown. I do recommend getting stuck in if you like that sort of thing.

Up to now I’ve used MAMP to get MySQL and Apache up and running quickly on my mac. I prefer to get under the hood as such when I have the time and set these things up individually. In this post I’ll go through simply installing the MySQL5 package and then build and install Apache2. Read on »

I’ve already blogged about Adobe’s ridiculous issue with case sensitive file systems. That gave me enough hassle on my own machine at home.

I finally got my iMac at work today. Gorgeous machine. Clean Leopard install, banged in the CS3 suite install disk and left it off to install while I went on lunch as the installer is notoriously slow. Came back from my lunch, the install was successful except for the small fact that it failed to install Photoshop and In-Design.

No indication was give as to what the problem was. Adobe’s install logs weren’t exactly informative either.
So I ran the installer again, this time just selecting the apps that failed to install. Waited 40mins to be told that the install failed again.

Finally I came across Adobe CS3 Clean, a script that Adobe have published that clears out any files that may be interfering with the install. This mainly deals with issues caused by having older Adobe suite apps or the CS3 beta suite hanging around but I figured what the hell.

I followed the instructions provided. Removed the entire suite. Ran the script using the more aggressive Level 2 option. And then reinstalled. Note that I also chose not to install Version Cue Server this time round, that may also have had an effect. After an hour or so the installer completed, this time with green ticks all round.

Hurrah!

For the last two days I watched as Leopard’s Mail.app tried to download 1 email at an average of 1kb per second.
My internet connection in general was fine yet it looked like it was going to take Mail the entire duration of Lent to download this email.

I figured I must have a setting wrong. I checked Google’s IMAP configuration instructions for Mail 3.x on Leopard. No Joy.
I tried using the information they provided for Mail 2.x setup. Those emails were still crawling down.

Finally I checked Google’s details for configuring other IMAP clients
It says you can use either port 465 or 587 for outgoing mail. I had been using 587, so I changed to port 465. Hey presto! Emails are now flying down. I don’t understand how a dodgy setup for outgoing mail could affect my incoming mail but I’m more than relieved to see Mail.app doing it’s thing now.