Twelvesouth Magic Wand - Product Recommendation

I have to say that twelvesouth definitely makes great products for Mac. I originally purchased the Compass Stand for iPad which I loved. The craftsmanship is great, you definitely feel the quality when you hold this product! Friends and Family members liked it so much that I ended up giving them as gifts last christmas. Now, they have this new product called the Magicwand which brings your wireless keyboard and your magic trackpad together. I received mine today and love it. I definitely recommend this to anyone that has these two items and desire to bring them together to make a complete keyboard. I think my mouse feels neglected today. Actually, you can place the magic trackpad on the opposite side of your mouse hand and use both in harmony, one hand using your mouse and the other pinching, zooming, rotating etc....

Google Chrome Beta 10 - Faster and GPU acceleration

On Thursday Google released their first Beta of Chrome 10 which is available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. Google claims faster JavaScript performance (66% faster), due to the new version of its V8 - Crankshaft JavaScript engine. It also introduces a preliminary implementation of GPU acceleration (already exists in Safari and IE9) for video which allows for more efficient processor utilization which leads to better battery life. The claim that in full screen video mode, CPU usage may decrease by 80%. They also introduce a new look for the settings dialogs which are now a tab with dedicated URLs to access them, so makes it really easy to help friends and family (check out the video below).



I suggest you go get it .. I am writing this post using Chrome 10 :-).

Install and Run Firefox 3 and Firefox 4 on your Mac!

As a web developer I always try to test as many browsers as possible including new beta releases, just like Firefox 4. With that being said, I was not ready to let go of Firefox 3 and I wanted to know how to run both on my mac. I tried this once before but my plugins and settings went crazy because both Firefox installs were sharing the same profile. So today I decided to figure out a way of how to easily do this if possible and came across an article at tech-recipies.com (link at end of article) that gave me the answer. The quick steps are as follows:

1. Download Firefox 4
2. Click on the downloaded dmg file to open.
3. Drag the Firefox Icon to your desktop. Do not drag to your applications folder as it will overwrite your Firefox 3 install.
4. Select the Firefox Icon on your desktop and hit enter and rename it to anything, you can use Firefox 4 like I did.
5. Drag the renamed application to the applications folder and now you should have something like below:
   
   
   
   

DO NOT START THE APPLICATION YET!
This is where we create a new profile so we can run Firefox 3 instance with our current profile and our new Beta version with a different profile.

1. Open the Terminal
2. type cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
3. type to run the ProfileManager: ./firefox-bin -ProfileManager
4. You should now see the following (except you will only have 1 profile)
   
   
   
   
5. A few things to note here, make sure to un-check Don't ask at startup so you can always choose when you open up Firefox. If you don't do this both version will try to always run the selected profile. Click on Create Profile to create a new profile. As you can see I renamed my default profile to Firefox3 and created a new one called Firefox Beta 4. This was omitted from the original article which I wanted to add because this allows for your FF3 to run as you currently have with all your current bookmarks, add-ons, etc and for FF4 to run with a new profile which you can have its own set of bookmarks, add-ons etc.

Once all that is done you will be able to run both Firefox instances at the same time like displayed below.

The original article that helped me is :
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2828/os_x_install_firefox_2_firefox_3_same_computer/

ColdFusion 9 - Multiple Sites - ColdBox - gotcha!!!

Yesterday I had this weird situation happen to me as I was developing locally on my Mac/Apache. Basically I was developing a second ColdBox site, set up as a VirtualHost which makes it easy for me to see in my browser by using URLs like http://site1.local and http://site2.local, which I control in my hosts file.

Well, now for the problem. Basically as I called App#1 everything worked fine but once I tried to access App#2 it would error out. As I started to troubleshoot a little more I noticed that App#2 was trying to execute a handler from App#1 (which I noticed by looking at the path in my error debug output). In truth, I wish I could say I figured it out right away but it took me a white as first I thought it was an apache issue and spend time looking at logs etc, then I finally decided to look at my ColdFusion administrator and by luck just decided to look at my Cache settings and there it was! ColdFusion 9 has a new setting called Component Cache, which caches component path resolution and then does not resolved again (picture below).

So basically once the sites would go execute the handler, it was resolving to the first path. ColdFusion9 has this checked by default and should not be for Multiple Site servers just like Cache web server paths setting. Hope this helps anyone out if you run into this new problem.

ColdBox Relax Released!

Another great tool has been released by the ColdBox team today.

ColdBox Relax - RESTful Tools For Lazy Experts! What is Relax? ColdBox Relax is a set of RESTful tools for lazy experts.

Click on the link below to find out more and watch Luis's introduction video.

http://blog.coldbox.org/post.cfm/introducing-coldbox-relax

ColdFusion Security Hotfix Released

A new security hot fix is available for the following versions:

ColdFusion 8.0, 8.0.1, 9.0, and 9.0.1 for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX

http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb11-04.html

Downgrade iPhone from 4.3 beta back to 4.2.1

Well, I am traveling tomorrow and unfortunately Skype still doesn't work on iOS 4.3 Beta 3, so I needed to downgrade. I previously thought it was not possible but it actually was very easy. There are many ways to do it, but I am just explaining the easiest way possible on a Mac, which was my situation.

First of you need the following:

• The 4.2.1 ipsw which you can find in the following folder
• ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates/
  In here you should see a file called iPhone3,1_4.2.1_8C148_Restore.ipsw (iPhone 4). If you had another iPhone like the 3GS you would see something similar but it would start with iPhone2,1
• If you want to restore your phone from a backup, that is easy too as long as you haven't deleted old backups. I saw a post that was explaining what to edit in the latest backup (in case you did it while in 4.3) which consisted of editing the backup's info.plist file. This consist of editing 2 strings to state the version and build so you don't get the can't restore from back up message. Even though I tried this I then received a message stating the back up was corrupt so I just chose an earlier backup I had that was a 4.2 backup. You can also just choose to set up as a new iPhone. If you want to try editing the latest backup you can find the file in the following directory and edit the 2 string listed below.
• ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/
• <key>Build Version</key><string>8C148</string>
• <key>Product Version</key><string>4.2</string>

So how can you do this, simple. Use the following steps.

1. Turn off the iPhone (you can hold down the Sleep button, or use Sleep + Home, and release as soon as the screen shuts off).
2. Hold down the Home button while connecting to your computer with iTunes already open and ready for a connection.
3. iTunes will prompt you to perform a software restore.
   Your iPhone will obviously be wiped new and be reset as a result and you wil have a working iPhone again.
4. Click the "Restore" button while holding down the option "alt" key and select the ipsw file.

That is it, let it go through the entire process and you are done.

Real Time Website Analytics and more

Today, I found out about this cool service from a 37Signals post regarding who is using their latest Basecamp release for mobile phones.

http://getclicky.com/

You can test it with one domain for free and then they have very flexible upgrade options which range from 3 set types and a custom type that you can build based on how many domains and page hits you get.