Groovy/Grails in Eclipse on OS X

I’ve been working with Grails for just a short time now and so far I’m fully impressed in the time savings it offers for development. The other factor the impresses me is that it all just makes intuitive sense for someone who has worked with a variety of web frameworks before.

I ran into an issue with Grails 1.0-RC1 with the Eclipse plugin on Mac. The framework was complaining that it could not find tools.jar which doesn’t exist on the Mac. I believe Apple for some reason merged the contents of tools.jar with another system jar. Anyhow, so far I have safely commented out a reference to tools.jar in conf/groovy-starter.conf. Other than that issue, I have had far fewer than there might be in setting up a full blown Struts 2/Spring/Hibernate project by hand.

I was just reading about the IntelliJ support for Groovy/Grails over on Glen Smith’s blog and think I will have to try it out. I have never used IntelliJ before but if it has better language support for Groovy than Eclipse currently does it would be worth switching.

Leopard so far

I’ve upgraded two Macs at home without issues during the upgrade. My work MBP is still running Tiger and probably will be for quite a while.

I’ve had issues with Time Machine really dragging down system performance until the first complete sync was completed. For some reason the first synchronization failed for several days. My complaint on Time Machine is that there is no immediate link or callout for viewing its log. There should be. I assume it is someplace in /var but I have not gone there yet.

Terminal is a big improvement.

XDMCP seems broken in some way. Akthough I can connect to my Ubuntu box, the keyboard doesn’t work now on the login screen. Ouch. The old trick of switching the keyboard to extended layout has no affect.

Lack of Java 6 support is of course just a shame.

Overall my impression is that performance sufers just a bit.

Google Notebook + Gears

Since moving mostly to a Mac for software development, one piece of software on Windows that I have been unable to find a replacement for is Microsoft OneNote. I use OneNote as a repository for notes and coding snippets that I find useful, want to try out, or just simply want to remember for some rainy day. Its beauty is in its simplicity as a quick note taking tool. I can paste something in it when I am in a hurry and then return and file it later when I have time. Certainly there are similar tools on the Mac but I simply haven’t broken my links with OneNote yet.

I had not paid much attention to Google Notebook until a few days ago. The Firefox browser plugin is brilliant. Now all the tool needs to be a complete replacement is offline support through Gears. I’m sure this will be soon. When the offline support is added, it becomes more than a replacement for OneNote for me. It becomes a useful note repository that isn’t tied to a single machine.  After the offline support a desktop client and a mobile client would certainly follow.

.Mac needs a facelift

I really like .Mac

I’ve tried several photo gallery sites and I like the flexibility of .Mac and the fact that it integrates into iLife. That much is great but the service is severly behind competitors like Flickr and PBase.

One thing that is needed is a more robust photo gallery. Sure I can export my photos from iPhoto. This is a great start but where are all the features after that? There’s no EXIF display. Why not? There’s no tagging mechanism, no comments, no contacts list, etc. There needs to be more for the price of the service.

One more thing: I think the calendar mechanism is very hidden and obscure. Why is this? Why isn’t calendar a top level menu item once I login?

.Mac team please tell me you are modernizing the service or better yet coming up with something more innovative.

GMail on Treo 680

This turns out to be easy to accomplish. I tried doing this by brute force first but then found some excellent directions on Google’s GMail site.

Setup GMail on Treo

I am stil testing out synch’ing with iCal and Google Calendar. I ended up resorting to calling Cingular who referred me to Palm on this one. It turns out that iSync needs to be enabled. I’m still fuzzy on if/how Palm Desktop is involved in synchronization, if at all.

The GMail app is a MIDlet and I got interested from listening to Jonathan Schwartz mention this in a recent interview.

Treo-enabled

So I have recently picked up a Palm Treo to use as my PDA/phone. I’ve owned several PDA’s in the past and none have stuck around. This one might since I’ll inevitably be carring a phone.

My first impression is that the whole thing is fairly well thought out by Palm. My previous phone was a Motorola and I was never convinced anyone had spent much time doing usability testing with its interface. The Palm is much better.

I had no trouble connecting to my IMAP account for email and I’m in the process of setting up my calendar to synchronize with iCal and Google Calendar. My corporate email is run on Notes so I’m a little stuck with trying to tie in my appointments from Notes. The best solution I have for now is to input my appointments from Notes into Google Calendar manually. I understand that Notes 7 may export to iCal which will be great whenever I get it.

Google Maps is the first app I’ve downloaded and it works great.

From my own usability. The color scheme lacks a high-contrast scheme. I need to surf around some more and see what I can come up with. Maybe I’ll try and contact Palm directly,

The Treo would be just perfect if it had WiFi and I could run Skype from it while at home.

Switching to Ubuntu

Today I cleaned off a spare 80GB drive and installed Ubuntu 6.10 on my Dell desktop PC. I had to leave it to dual boot Windows. I intend though to mostly run Ubuntu and use it to serve iTunes using mt-daapd and also use it as a development machine for running Oracle Express and Subversion.

The machine that I installed Ubuntu has been running the same copy of Windows XP since about 2002. It amazing how slow the machine has gotten over time and it won’t even shutdown anymore without killing processes.

I’m looking forward to getting comfortable with Ubuntu and let it take over a lot of tasks I normally did on Windows.

Ubuntu and Frontrow

Photography is a hobby of mine and I have accumulated a probably 50GB of images. I switched from using a PC at home to a Mac for processing my images with Photoshop. I don’t use iPhoto but I really like Frontrow. Here’s what I want to setup at home: I have Ubuntu Server 6.06 running and would really like to use it as a media server, especially for my photos. I know I could just use Samba and file sharing but I’d like my Mac to see it via Frontrow so that I could browse all of the images.

I’m not sure exactly where the answer lies yet. I’ve spent a little time Googling and so far have only turned up the fact that I need to get zeroconf installed. I’m going to have to dig into Apple’s site next and find out if there is any docs for developers regarding what protocol is used for establishing a photo share as iPhoto does.

One side project I’m thinking of is some way to setup or even write a background process on my Ubuntu box that would convert incoming raw images to jpeg and then drop them into directories to be browsed via Frontrow. Do any Java libraries exist for processing digital camera raw images?

more Mac thoughts

I recently picked up on Cedric’s discussion regarding switching from Windows to the Mac. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs the main factor for me has been that the Mac OS offers vastly superior features for accessibility compared to Windows. This is still working well for me.

I also seem to have gotten over figuring out how to organize my development environment.

I’m still plagued by trying to learn keyboard shortcuts on the Mac though. I wish that the keystrokes multi-selecting files in the Finder mapped out the same as they do in Windows. I cringe when I’m faced with this task and have to reach for my mouse to get the job done.

Another shortcut that I haven’t figured out is that home and end don’t seem to work in an edit fied on the Mac. Why can’t I highlight the entire field by pressing option-home or something similar?

Finally the keboard shortcut I’m lacking most is ability to press Alt+Home in Firefox and have it bring me to my default homepage which is Google and the focus is set to the search field. I’m also trying out Camino lately.

I’m late to the show in becoming a del.icio.us user. Like most people I collect a lot of links and get tired of constantly organizing and cleaning out my favorites and also synchronizing them across all the computers that I use. Now its as simple as adding open button titled “post to del.icio.us” to each browser I use.

del.icio.us/aharvey

MacBook and world’s smallest screwdriver

So my memory arrives from Crucial for my MacBook. Great I think to myself. I'll just pop that in and go run PhotoShop at full speed. I open my tiny Apple users's guide and flip to the section on replacing memory. The booklet tells me that I should use a size 00 Philips screwdriver. What's that? I look all over the house and come up with the smallest possible Philips screwdriver I can find and its way too enormous and I'm paranoid that I'm going to strip one of the screws trying to remove the memory cover. Tomorrow I'll find out if the local hardware store has such a size 00 Philips screwdriver. I sure hope so.