This might be obsolete when Apple releases Leopard and it’s desktop stacks, but Overflow is a great utility app for organizing your shise. Overflow let’s you group applications, folders and files into categories that you can quickly access by hitting ‘F1′. Below is my ‘Dev’ category, I also make a category for all my current projects with links to the more frequently accessed (but hard to find) files like stylesheets.

The release of Apollo has renewed my interest in Flex, I was on the Flex Builder Beta for OS X but don’t do enough Flex work (yet) to shell out for Builder so… I Googled around for the best open source solution.

It was my lucky day as Todd Sharp updated Darron Schall’s 2005 post about setting up eclipse just yesterday. That solved code coloring/hinting, I then found this tutorial by Wim Vanhenden for compiling on OS X. Done and done.

Don’t know if it’s my imagination but the Flex SDK seems to compile much more quickly than a couple of months ago. The only downside to this solution is that it doesn’t use my beloved Textmate, there is a bundle for Flex but it doesn’t seem to have been updated in a while.

* UPDATE *

Actually just did a search and found some ‘Textmate Flex Tips‘ that extends the Flex bundle.

I’ve been using CSSEdit for the last couple of months and it’s sharply increased my productivity when working with style sheets. Today MacRabbit released version 2.0 (of course) and it is jaw-droppingly good, TextMate good.

There are five major new features but my favorite so far is ‘Overridding’ which as the name suggests give you the ability to override live website styles. As it can overide live sites you can do away with the edit>save>refresh>test method when making style sheet changes on a dynamic site. Changes can be previewed without even saving the style sheet. In the screen shot below I’m changing the a:link color of the blog with the color wheel.

Overriding extracts the style sheets from the live site so all you rip-off artists can extract style sheets even faster than before! :P

Another cool new feature is ‘X-ray’ which let’s you select page elements such as a divs margin and padding. The page elements are listed hierarchically (html>body>div#container>div#sidebar>div#links) so you can easily select a parent object.

A new feature I know I’ll be using a lot is ‘Milestones’ which are similar to Photoshop’s history and layer comps, you can set a milestone and then proceed down different roads without fear of losing your original style if you make a mess of things.

Version 2.0 is much snappier than the old version and it looks great too, it makes use of newer Apple interface elements you’d see in the latest iTunes and the Pro Applications.

If you do web design/development on a Windows box, and TextMate wasn’t enough of a reason to dump your fugly PC and even worse OS, you’d be crazy not to switch after using CSSEdit.

Some basic Unix/Linux commands that are also helpful on OS X’s Terminal.

‘ls’ lists the contents of a directory

ls‘cd’ change directory (go into a directory)

cd [directory name]‘mv’ move a file or directory

mv [directory] [new/location]‘rm’ remove a file or directory (directory must be empty)

rm [fileToDelete]‘rm -rf’ remove a directory AND it’s contents (without confirmation)

rm -rf [aDirecotyFullofStuff]

‘du -s -k’ get the size of a directory in KBytes

du -s -k [aDirecotry]

Django is a web framework similar to Ruby on Rails, it’s crown jewel is a built in admin/CMS system that saves tons of time when setting up a dynamic site.

Django is pretty easy to install, if you have the correct version of Python, if you have MySQLdb for Python, if you know how add apps/scripts to your $PATH, if you haven’t installed a previous version, if you have Subversion installed, and especially if you’re a programmer rather than a designer who programs (I’m the latter).

“There’s two many ifs in that sentence Johnny”

~Reese Witherspoon as June Carter in ‘Walk the Line’

Let’s try and remove those IFs by going through an install step by step. Getting Django running locally the first time took me about four hours, following these instructions it should take you less than one hour. Prerequisites are that you have Apple’s Developer Tools (on the CD that came with your mac or here), MySQL (here), and Subversion (here) installed. you don’t HAVE to have subversion installed but it makes life easier.

Here we go…

1. Install the latest greatest Python (2.4.3 at this date)
2. Django of course needs a database so install MySQLdb (you have MySQL installed localy right?)
3. Test your python installation, open up Terminal.app and type

   python

   you should see text similar to this

   Python 2.4.3 (…) [GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1666)] on darwin Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information. >>>

4. Test MySQLdb. Type

   >>> import MySQLdb

   (Note: >>> is the Python prompt) If the python interpreter doesn’t complain you have MySQLdb installed properly.

5. Next up is Django itself. These are slightly modified instructions from the Django site. Go back to the Terminal, most likely Python is still running hit ‘control-D’ to exit. You should be in your ‘Home’ directory this is where the Django souce will be installed (it will actually just live here and links will be set up between Django and Python). Enter the following

   svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django_src

   This downloads the latest Django source through Subversion into a folder called ‘django_src’

6. Create a ’symlink’ (symbolic link) so Python knows where to look for Django. This is where we part ways with the Django website’s tutorial, Python2.4 on Tiger lives in a much different directory than the one their tutorial uses (do not enter this)

   ln -s `pwd`/django_src/django /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django

   our Python install’s ’site-packages’ is located at

   /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/

   because Python 2.4 was installed as a Framework. So our symlink looks like this

   ln -s /users/[USERNAME]/django_src/django/ /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django

   Note: [USERNAME] should be your username (wait what’s my username?! it’s your login, also shows up in the terminal on every line before the $)

7. Test your django installation in the Terminal type

   python

   then

   >>> import django

   if you get no complaint from the Terminal Django is installed!

8. Well…. not quite, Django uses

   django-admin.py startproject mysite

   to start a new Django app, however django-admin.py is not on your path so Python doesn’t know where to find it. Open up .bash_profile from your root directory - if you have TextMate or BBEdit you can open it from the Terminal.

   mate .bash_profile

   add the following line to your .bash_profile file.

   export PATH=/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/bin:$PATH

   Now django-admin.py is on your path, prove it by going to the terminal and echoing your path

   echo $PATH

   you’ll get a response like this

   /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/bin:/users/[USERNAME]/django_src/django/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

Now go to the Django site and get cracking on the first tutorial.