Suppose you have a Java Swing application which you can start by typing the following on the command line:
java -jar myTerrificSwingApp.jar
If you want to make that application start from the Finder in OSX, there are a lot of options which range from ugly to convoluted. If you need a quick fix, here’s how to do it.
This evening I came accross the window.moveBy() JavaScript function and thought it would be cool to shake the browser window when a user fails to log in. It turns out that I was not the only one thinking this, but none of the examples worked for me. Some had no proper delays, others only worked from the page header, and some were plain unreadable.
I’m no Javascript guru, but I hacked this together which is working pretty nicely. It is in fact almost undistinguishable from the Apple login window shake at a login failure:
<script type="text/javascript">
if (window.moveBy) {
delay = 70;
shakes = 3;
window.moveBy(-10, 0);
for (j = shakes; j > 0; j--) {
setTimeout( "window.moveBy(20, 0)", j*delay );
setTimeout( "window.moveBy(-20, 0)",
j*delay+(delay/2));
}
setTimeout( "window.moveBy(10, 0)", (shakes+1)*delay );
}
</script>
In my case, I surrounded this code with a Tapestry @Conditional and made it into a reusable Tapestry component so that I can make any window shake as soon as it contains an error.
The code will work anywhere on your page, but I advise you to put it at the bottom of the HTML. This will make sure that the content is shown in the browser before you shake it.
It’s visually much stronger than just adding an errortext to the page. If people log in a couple of times a day, they don’t even notice extra text on the screen. This will “shake” them awake 🙂
Have fun!
My wife bought me a playstation 3 last year, and I’ve enjoyed many hours of gaming on it, finishing Tomb Raider underworld, and now making decent progress in Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction.
I was a bit sceptical about the DLNA capabilities of the PS3, because I read a lot of bad news on this fairly new “Interoperability Guidelines” concept. It sounded like a lot of trouble to go through to simply watch the photos and home videos on a TV. For weeks, I was not able to find a single site telling me how to install a DLNA server on my Mac, or where to find a decent one.
Altgough they’re hard to find, there are a few OSX DLNA servers out there. One of them is actually very good. Here’s what I found:
“Remote Desktop Connection.app” allows you to see the desktop of a remote Windows machine on your mac. This application will not update itself automatically, unless you have it installed as part of the Microsoft Office for Mac suite. If you’ve downloaded the 1.0.3 version you probably did not notice that “Remote Desktop Connection.app” was updated somewhere last year by microsoft.
You can find the latest version of Remote Desktop Connection on the Microsoft Mactopia site. Version 2 is an improvement over 1.0.3 (which I had). Notable differences are:
I played with it for a while, and apart form the new looks I can not say it’s very different from the 1.0.x version. It could load my old RDC 1.0.3 configuration files. If you need to connect to a Windows desktop from your Mac, this does the job just fine.
There is a nice and clean way to automatically mount network shares each time you log into your Mac. It’s called the “Bonjour Mounter”, a simple application which runs on login, and mounts the drives you configured it to mount. No more, no less.
Did you know that your installation of Leopard comes with a built-in performance monitor? It’s called “Instruments” and you can attach it to any process currently running. In the screenshot you see here I attached it to an instance of Eclipse while running some unittests.
Instruments has some nice templates for you to choose from, and you can monitor CPU activity per thread, disk I/O, User Interface activity, Object allocations, and leaks. Just so you know, it might come in handy.
If you’re a SQuirreL SQL fan like me, and you use a Mac, you probably also want to know how to add a driver to the OSX version of the application. Most people just point to an external jar file, but you can also add drivers to the application bundle. There’s not much to it, but it took me some time to discover that I actually had to edit the plist file in the bundle after adding the driver.
As you can see on the left, my SQuireLSQL.app now comes with the Oracle OCI and Thin driver built in, and because they are part of the application bundle, I can’t wreck my installation by misplacing jarfiles or reconfiguring classpaths. Nice.
If you want to drivers to your SQuireLSQL.app yourself, here’s what you need to do:
I recently downloaded Eclipse 3.4.1 for Mac OSX, and tried starting it using the eclipse.app icon. It did not work, and I noticed a message in /var/log/system.log telling me that the JVM could not be loaded.
If you’re working on some source code and you quickly need to insert a hexadecimal color code for a color you currently have on your screen, then here is a neat little trick I found:
First, install Hex Color Picker by Waffle software. It will add an extra option to the built-in OSX color picker to show you the selected color in Hex.
To reach the color picker, you usually start up any application which uses the standard OSX color picker and just choose “choose color”. What you can also do, is have the OSX color picker behave as a standalone application in 3 simple steps:
On StackOverflow, there is a question asking for the greatest programmer quotes you know. In the top 3 quotes are the following two quotes which I think hold much truth:
“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Rick Osborne
“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” – Brian Kernighan
These two quotes are briliantly summing up the usual rant I always use. “if my phone rings at 3 a.m. for a prio 1 production issue, I want to be able to easily read the code. And I’m not going to be awake or cheerful at that time of night.” I guess at that time of night, it’s easy to awaken the violent psychopath in me, and so it better not be “smart” code. CVS blame support anybody?