Archive for the ‘Mac OS X’ Category

http://localhost

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Having a local web server to test your web sites and applications is essential to your development environment. It is very easy to set-up numerous virtual hosts for each of your projects, which allows you to develop your interactive masterpieces in a close to real world implementation. There are actually many aspects of Flash development that will exhibit different behavior or not even work at all if not served from a valid domain and by golly localhost counts. We’ll cover setting this up on Mac OS X 10.4, with additional notes on the differences with 10.5 at the end.
(more…)

Garbled Fonts on Mac OS X

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Have you ever had this problem?

AIM screenshot

AIM screenshot

I’ve had this problem off and on over the past couple years and never figured out exactly what the issue was. Removing all my fonts always did the trick, but seemed a bit excessive. I finally came across this article that explains it all: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301245

Basically you need to remove Helvetica Fractions from your system and it clears up right away. You’d be surprised how many people have this issue. Since I figured it out I’ve helped quite a number of people with this, which has led me to post it here. Hope it helps.

Hiding Illustrator

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

⌘cmd+H hides just about everything except Adobe’s Illustrator. I’m not sure why “Hide Edges” is so much more important than having the program work in the most basic of ways as other programs do. Not supporting ⌘cmd+H is like making “Copy” ⌘cmd+U because you wanted to make ⌘cmd+C “Copy Filter”, it just doesn’t make since. At least there is an easy solution, here’s how.
(more…)

Unix directories in the finder

Friday, October 10th, 2008
⌘ + Shift + G

⌘ + Shift + G

Most Mac users don’t even realize that there is a Unix based underbelly on their Mac, so it’s probably good that those directories are not readily available in the Finder. For those of us that rock the Terminal on a regular basis, it can sometimes be frustrating that the only way to utilize the Unix side is through command line only.

Luckily God invented key command shortcuts! Press ⌘ cmd + shift + G with an open Finder window, open or save dialog box and you can navigate to any directory on your computer by typing it in starting with the root directory. This is great when you want to use TextMate for editing or viewing config files. You may run into some permission issues, but some careful manipulation of what group you belong to can fix that.