While BKWLD may be one of the most Apple/Mac centric companies I’ve worked at (only 1 guy in our Seattle office uses something other than a Mac), Microsoft has been whittling away at their next monster, Windows 7. I’ve been really impressed with how Microsoft has been handling the lead up until its release of Windows 7, namely, its free release of the Release Candidate that will work until June 2010. I decided to check it out by installing Boot Camp on my iMac at home, so I could play some good old video games on Steam.

I won’t post a full tutorial here, there are plenty a Google search away, (I ended up with the 32-bit version because of some issues with the RC on a Mac).

Windows 7’s install is much improved from Windows XP (I have never used or installed Windows Vista) it was simple, non instrusive, and smooth.

However, I got everything running great, when I rebooted back into Mac OS X, my wifi would simply not work. DHCP would simply not grab an IP address from my router no matter what I tried.

I decided that it was time to try a good ol’ Archive and Install of Mac OS X, but I was worried about the reinstall messing up all my recent work getting Boot Camp up and running. I googled for hours and could not find a definititive answer to my question, “Will Boot Camp still work after a Mac OS X Archive and Install?”

I couldn’t find any definitive answer, so I just decided to screw it all, and try it out. Reinstall worked flawlessly, my wifi was back in Mac OS X, and Windows 7 on Boot Camp still works great!

Update: You can download Windows 7 at microsoft.com.

We use MAMP PRO as our local environment when we do LAMP work.  Here’s how to set it up using DynDNS so that you can provide web accessible urls to your vhosts.  This is handy to share with clients or coworkers in other offices but also for using web apps like Litmus (which was the situation I was in today).

1) Create a free account at dyndns.com.  Once you’ve activated your account, go here to create your domains.  Name them whatever you want and use the auto detected IP address.  Go through the add to cart hoops, but it will be free.

2) Setup port forwarding in your router.  You may not need to this, but I’m guessing most would and it’s the most confusing part IMO.  We have an Airport Extreme and the configuration is below.  10.0.1.201 is the local IP of my computer on our network.  I’m port 80 externally to my local port 80.

3) Setup MAMP.  Last step, go into MAMP and add the domain you created in DynDNS as an alias of your vhost.  This isn’t super documented but I saw the tip here.  It should all be humming now.  Now you can go to whatever.hobby-site.org and the request will travel down to your local box.

First thing I do is have my mail forward from gmail to an imap account on our dreamhost dev server. This is because I don’t like how gmail handles flagging. But essentially, I setup Mail.app to check my mail via imap. I leave my Inbox in threaded view and I use that for looking up old conversations. The crux of what I do differently is I have a smart folder named “To Do” that I am in most of the time and essentially my real inbox. Here are it’s settings:

Thus, this smart folder shows anything I’ve flagged and anything that is new. Also, when you unflag or read something it doesn’t disappear. So really, this todo folder shows all recent stuff as well, until you click to look at a new folder. In addition, I color code emails too using groups in my address book. Green is BKWLD, blue is friends, orange is family, etc. So, my todo mailbox ends up looking like:

This way I can quickly keep track of new things and stuff that still needs attention. And I achieve the zero stuff in inbox serenity if I can work through all the flagged and unread emails without having to actually move or delete things.

I’ve always wanted to change tabs in TextMate so it worked the same way as Safari. I found this post that explains how. But even more so, it got me remembering that System Pref. I’ve seen it in there but never used it. And it works great!

When I first saw the inaccuracy of the new maps triangulation feature I figured I’d never find much use for it. For instance, I couldn’t use it to get from my office home, since the range it gave for my office was so big. But yesterday it came handy a couple of times:

• I was on the train on the way to Portland and was able to figure out where I was on the route
• I was in Portland, which I don’t know super well, and was able to get the map centered in generally the right area, from which I was able to look for street signs.

Also, I noticed that if you use the triangulation twice in row, you’ll get different results. For instance, the error range was super huge one time, but I hit again and it narrowed down to only about a block size error range.

Fluid is a webkit-powered site specific browser generator like Mozilla’s Prism.

Site specific browsers are web browsers dedicated to displaying a specific website or web application, such as Basecamp, Facebook, or Gmail. They can be quite handy if you tend to spend a lot of your time in a website or web application, and don’t want to clutter up your browser with lots of tabs. If your browser crashes, you’re also safe from loosing changes in your web app.

Fluid allows you to create an infinite number of site specific browsers on the fly, complete with their own icons. I have one for Basecamp and one for my local install of phpMyAdmin.

Go download it and give it a try. Also be sure to visit the Fluid Flickr group for all your icon needs. There’s even a phpMyAdmin icon by your’s truly,

Melvin Rivera posted a great work around to get “Back To My Mac” style remote acceptability to your various Leopard Macs. This is directed at non-.Mac users, however .Mac user like my self and Robert who have yet to actually get BTMM to work can take advantage as well. I have been using this method for a few days and it works like a charm!

Follow the directions and you should be in business, And don’t skip the privacy step… that could potentially end badly!

What you will need:

Macie J outlines ten cool new features in the latest Safari release. This is the version of Safari that ships with Leopard, and is included with the Tiger 10.4.11 software update. One of the biggest highlights for me is full support of the TinyMCE rich text editor.

There’s also quite a bit of other super advanced stuff, like SVG, CSS3 support and the new web inspector. Stuff we’ve been enjoying for a while in the WebKit nightly is finally in the real world. Good stuff.

I installed Leopard on my work comp last night. Because I was scarred of php/mysql config from Mark’s post I ended up using Mamp. Just learned of it this morning and installed it, but it’s working pretty nice. One useful thing is it makes it really easy to change your apache directory, so you could test sites out as the root of the webserver without any host file / vhost shenanigans. Also, you can quickly switch between php 4 and 5. I wish it installed as a system pref instead of an app, but still, pretty rad.

I’ve been running Leopard on my laptop for the past week (haven’t put it on my work comp yet) and there is a lot I like, but as usual, there are a number of irritants. One on that list I’ve been able to put to bed. The finder behaves unexpectedly when used with spaces. Or rather, it behaves like it should, but it just feels weird. To be able to manage the finder absolutely, in my case making it available in all spaces, you just need to know where to look for it.