Have a Cocoa Christmas

in
In this holiday season, there are several charity event in the Mac community and one of them is the A Holiday Cocoa Duel!.

It is in a hope of raising donation from the community to the charity by offering a number of holiday-themed applications.

Below is a summary on what each of the application do.


Operation X -> A game having santa to deposit gift through the chimney of each house but there's a F-16 to get into your way.

SantaSnaps -> My personal favorite, loaded up something like Photo booth but you can put up all the xmas decoration on yourself.

Snow Tracker -> Screen saver, for astrologist I think.

Snowy -> Snow, snowman and penguin everywhere.

Snowplane -> Dim the screen and snow falling on the background.

Photocard -> Forget to send out xmas card to your friend? No worry, create an e-card with ease!

Snow Wars -> Mr. Snowman is boring, they said let's have a snowball fight, the catapult style.

MacGiftWrap -> Want some decoration on your folder but don't want to change it one bye one? This app will replace the finder folder with ribbon wrapping around.

Mac Lights -> Decorate your desktop with Christmas light.

Holiday Lights -> Allow you to assign lights to Cocoa application.

Santa's Gizmo -> Let's hear what the developer said - "We embarked on a quest - a quest to obtain the ultimate machine. Struggling through the perils of the icy northern hemisphere, we flew over Kybar's Teeth, fought polar bears, and battled the vicious Elven Mages."

iSled -> Having the sled rider running accorss your screen.


Enjoy the offering but don't forget to donate.

Have a Merry Cocoa Christmas!

A joy to do software development in OS X

in ,
I have been enjoying to do development in OS X for years, in JAVA most of the time. Eclipse, SVN, Apache ANT, Tomcat, Mysql .. all runs flawlessly and I can do deployment easily.

But I am enjoying even more lately with my first rails app. I do this with 3 apps most of the time, which I can "flow" nicely in between.


  1. Textmate
  2. CSSEdit 2
  3. DBVisualizer


Using the GUI of Textmate is like licking a tasty candy - Syntax highlighting, auto closing of tags, project navigation pane. It allows me to modify the different files in both tree mode and tabbed pages.

When I am doing the frontend, I start with the CSS. In this new version, the "X-ray" and "preview" are the 2 features that I like a lot. I can open the preview window and check out how my changes are like. When I am done, I switch back to Textmate for the logic. BTW, Textmate allows me to open CSSEdit from the project tree when I right click on any CSS file.

Upon execution, I will need to check if the backend operates as desired. Now the DBVisualizer comes into picture, I can do SQL query, browse through data easily. And not to mention, this is a FREE application.

To complete the package, I relies on "Transmit" for ftp transmission (btw, it's nice to be able to right click on any file and open with Textmate for editing) and "Color Schemer Studio" in preparing the color scheme. It's always good to get inspiration from others.

As a side note, the environment switching in Ruby is welcoming. Since the DB setting on my local machine differs from my server, I only need to setup accordingly in the "Test" and "Development" environment in the file database.yam. Startup my webbrick with additional attribute, and I am set.


ruby script/server -e test



I treasure these little thing since I work on my mbp many hours in a day.