Snow Leopard Install

I updated my MacBook Pro to Apple’s latest operating system Snow Leopard 10.6. This is how I did it and my install went fine.
First, check to make sure any programs that you need are compatible or have been updated to work with 10.6. The best place I have found was this wiki http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/. I had some software that was not compatible but for me, but the software was not that big of a deal and I could wait for updates.
The next thing I did was run a full maintenance on my computer using Maintenance. This clean a lot of stuff out and repaired any permissions.
After that I just rebooted to the install disk and followed the onscreen instructions. Everything was fine. I got back about 6GB of space.
I did have to uninstall the software for my HP AIO 2570 printer and add it using the Printers & Faxes, but everything works including scanning. Scanning directly from Preview is nice.
Well that’s how I did it and it worked for me.

Events created in iPod Touch do not appear in iCal after syncing

I had the problem of when I added new events on my iPod Touch they would not show up in iCal after syncing. The quick fix for me was to open iSync, go to Preferences, then click the Reset Sync History… button. This resolved the issue for me. Hope this helps somebody else.

Developing for WordPress on a Macintosh

I’m helping a local church redesign their website. Since they are not programmers I thought the best approach would be to use wordpress so they can easily update the site. To develop the site I wanted to use my mac and this is how I set it up. Download XAMPP and WordPress. Install XAMPP, just use the installer, it makes it simpler. XAMP installs into your Applications directory and this is the only place it can be installed.

XAMPP stores the web site in the htdoc folder, but I wanted my development sites in my Sites folder, so I had to do a little tweeking. You just need to use virtual hosts to point to you dev site. In the httpd.conf file change the DocumentRoot and the Directory  to “/Users/<your name>/Sites and uncomment the Virtual Hosts include. 

Open the httpd-vhosts.conf file and add the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot “/Users/<your name>/Sites/wordpress”
ServerName <site name>.localhost
</VirtualHost>

Now one last thing, you need to change your host file so you can access you site with <site name>.localhost. You’ll need to add something like this at the end of the file:

## Custom 
127.0.0.1  <site name>.localhost

This makes it nice because wordpress like to be in the root directory. 

Copy the wordpress folder to you Sites folder and your ready to go!

iMovie 08

I have a Sony DCR-SR200 camcorder with a lot of home movies on it. I decided it was time to get the movies onto the computer to edit them and free up some space on the camcorders 40GB hard drive. Getting the movies into iMovie 08 is incredibly easy. Just launch iMovie and plug in the camcorder, select the clips and import. It’s so much faster than my old DV camcorder where importing a movie was real time. After using iMovie a little more each time I learn some new stuff and I thought I would share.

I am running out of space on my notebooks hard drive and as you know raw video footage takes up some room. So if you have an external hard drive, connect the hard drive before you start iMovie and you can import to the external hard drive. Also, you can move imported events to an external hard drive by:

1. Open iMovie
2. Change the view in the Events window to View Events by Volume. You can do this by clicking the Volume icon to the right of Event Library or by right-clicking in the Event Library and selecting it.
3. Open the volume where your events are stored. Select it and drag it to the volume you want to store it in. This puts the event at the root of the volume in an iMovie Events folder.

This is great if you have a notebook like me. 

I also learned how to capture a still from the video, just place the playhead on the frame you want, right-click and select Add still to project. This was a feature I liked in iMovie HD but did not know how to do in 08. It’s also very easy just to drag and drop titles and transitions into the project.

The more I use iMovie 08 the more I am coming to like it. I was like all the other naysayers when the new iMovie appeared, iMovie HD was fine and I was comfortable using it. Give iMovie 08 a try, play around with it, you might be surprised. 

If you have any tips, tricks or questions let me know.

Komodo Edit vs. Textwrangler

I have used Textwrangler on my Mac since the day it was released free. I really do like Textwrangler, but I have been using Komodo Edit for awhile now and I like it. There are a couple of reasons I am using Komodo edit over Textwrangler these days. 1) Auto complete, Komodo Edit has auto completion on the fly, unlike Textwrangler where you have to use an applescript. 2) Code folding, it’s nice to hide functions that I don’t need to see. These are the two big reasons I prefer Komodo Edit. The last reason is I can use it on my Mac and my work windows PC. The only downside to the program is it’s not a native application like Textwrangler, so it’s a tad slow. If Textwrangler ever gets code completion, I’ll be back.

Leopard Upgrade

Well, I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5. And I have to say I love it. For a person with limited memory capacity, I love the quick look feature. The upgrade went smooth except for one small glitch. First I used the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner to back a bootable backup of my entire hard drive. Then I made sure I could boot from it. Then I did an upgrade. This all went very smooth. The only problem was my keychain. I did not have any of my saved passwords. After a little trial and error, I realized that on the Leopard install, the keychain was login.keychain, and on my back up the keychain was wes.keychain. So I copied over the wes.keychain, and renamed it login.keychain. Ran keychain repair a couple of times and all was good. Now all my passwords were available and I did not have to retype everything.

Which Mac FTP Program?

A friend of mine, Shaun wanted to know of a Mac FTP program. I gave him two choices: Free and Not-Free.
My free choice was Cyberduck. A very nice FTP client for free. Unlike the programmer of Cyberduck, I would prefer to have a pane that shows my local file structure. But you really can’t complain when it’s free.
My non-free choice was Transmit. If I was using ftp more than occasionally, this would be well worth the money. The feature that I really like is the option to transfer files from server to server. Very nice!
What’s your favorite and why?