MacOSX

Mavericks - Part 3

Another upgrade gotcha - for some reason after a upgrade I seem to have my power on after power failure setting cleared - so make sure that you check this if your computer is supposed to power up after a power failure. Read More...

Mavericks - Part 2

At least a partial solution to the problem with Contacts (AddressBook) has been found ... apparently my Library file was marked with an schg flag - this really upset iCloud. Read More...

Mavericks

I just completed my upgrade to OS X Mavericks and so far have hit 3 glitches:
  • Install hung
  • Can’t search contacts
  • Realmac Clear for Mac goes non-responsive
Apart from these issues so far so good.
Read More...

Prowl as a Nagios Notifier

Prowl (@ProwlApp) works now (Apple it seems has finally sorted out its developer portal issues in relation to certificates) and notifications are flowing. All in all the presentation and configuration of alerts is great. Read More...

Prowl

As part of improving my reporting of Nagios alerts I decided to try using the Growl framework via Prowl to my iPhone. This was precisely the wrong time to do so as Apple is having an extended down time on their developer centre and a certificate renewal and hence his push notifications are not working. I have to praise the developer of Prowl as in spite of his obvious frustrations he has used Twitter to keep his users informed in a humorous and effective way. This is one of the best examples of handling a fault that is out of your control and crippling to your business that I have seen. Read More...

Fluid: not quite there

After testing fluid for a couple of hours I found that it had a number of problems with some of the web sites I was most interested in wrapping up; but would probably work fine for other commercial web sites. Read More...

Fluid

Today I bumped in to one of those apps you always knew should be easy and should have: Fluid. This application wraps up a web site and makes an application icon you can click on to start. Read More...

Internationalising PHP Web Control Panels

Cocoa on OS X is Unicode based. This makes working with non-ASCII character sets fairly easy … provided you can encode them in a unicode format. PHP has some facilities for writing UTF-8 character set based files. Read More...

Open - Apple's little secret

OS X’s open command is the secret sauce for gluing web control panels to OS X applications. Read More...

Replacing Cocoa applications with a new instance

Sometimes you need to start a Cocoa application and have it replace a previously running instance of itself. In the case of the application that we are writing it is invoked by the open command line command and we then want it to replace a previously running version of the program. If the application is activated from the GUI we want the default behaviour going to the open application to be preserved. Read More...