If you, like me, have migrated from using Subversion to Git, you may be missing the ability to link commits with FogBugz cases. I have adapted the Subversion integration post commit hook to work with Git.

It should be noted that integration with repositories hosted on GitHub can be found by clicking on this link, to appropriately enough, GitHub (via a blog post on FogBugz). These instructions are for use with local repositories.

I have simply taken the Subverson integration script, that is available at this link on the FogBugz website and adapted it for use with Git.

To use, follow the instructions below:

• Install Perl in the unlikely situation that it is not already installed on your system
• Install wget. On Mac OS X, you can install via MacPorts by simply typing sudo port install wget in a Terminal window.
• Download post-commit and logBugDataGit.pl by clicking on this link to GitFogBugz.zip
• Unzip the archive and copy the two scripts to your [Path To Project]/.git/hooks directory and make sure they are both executable
• Edit logBugDataGit.pl as follows:
  • If you are using the free FogBugz version set $BUGZ_URL_FINAL to https://yourdomain.fogbugz.com and set $IS_TRIAL to 1.
  • If you host your own FogBugz installation, set $BUGZ_SERVER to your domain without http:// and set $IS_TRIAL to 0.

That’s it, there is not step 6!

In Martin’s post and the comments there are some links to great resources to get going with accessibility:

Apple’s Accessibility Developer Page.

Assistive Technology for the Mac Resources

Assistive Ware Videos

At WWDC ’06 I went to the Accessibility session and it was the best Hands-On sesssion I’ve been to at WWDC. The 2006 Session video does not seem to be available any more, but the 2008 session can be found from the link below. It requires access to ADC on iTunes, you may need to log into ADC on iTunes first, or simply look for session 326.

WWDC ’08 – Session 326 – Application Accessibility

The 2006 session had an excellent sample application, Dicey, that takes you through stages of increased accessibility. It can be found here:

Dicey Sample Code

However I would like to extend Martin’s challenge. Most independent Mac software developers sell their products exclusively via the web. Therefore for their software to be fully accessible, Mac developers need to make their websites accessible as well.

Information on this can be found at W3C, the web’s standards body, and elsewhere:

W3C’s Accesibility Initiative

Dive Into Accessibility Guide

I would call on all Mac developers to take up the Mac Accessibility Challenge.

Last week saw the release of Cornerstone, a new Subversion GUI client for the Mac from Zennaware. After initial testing, I am quite excited about Cornerstone, as it breaks new ground for Version Control Graphical Clients.

Historically, graphical version control clients have simply put a GUI on top of the command line tools. It is disappointing that there is little or no thought given to the problems that developers want to solve with their source control systems. Developers of these applications seem to completely forget the issues they themselves face.

Cornerstone’s most impressive feature and one that I have discussed extensively in the #macsb IRC channel is it’s timeline. You can easily go forward and back through the history of a file and see changes for each subsequent version. Whilst this falls short of my wishes for a source control timeline, it is a massive step in the right direction.

Cornerstone’s source code diff tool looks great, but still cannot identify when a method has simply moved within a file. If you change the method as well as move it, which is quite common, the changes are not clearly highlighted in Cornerstone, Xcode or any other diff tool I have come across on the Mac. I had already decided that a future version of Differencia will act as a source-code aware diff tool.

Whilst there are a long list of feature requests I have already for Cornerstone, after only a day’s use, it is a huge relief to find that someone is taking source control seriously.

The iPhone will undoubtedly be a success in the enterprise market. Anyone who doubts that is kidding themselves or trying to downplay the iPhone for marketing their own products.

The question is whether success with the iPhone will lead to increased enterprise Mac sales. There has been a long debate as to whether the iPod Halo effect exists. Will there be an Enterprise iPhone Halo effect.

The key factor is that enterprise IT departments will have to purchase Macs and learn Mac development tools to develop custom, internal, iPhone apps. Whilst many enterprises have a small number of Macs in their design, web and media departments, having Macs in their IT departments is much more likely to lead to a wider uptake of Macs.

Although administration and development functions are normally quite separate in enterprise IT departments, administrators are going to make considerably more effort to better integrate Macs into their environment for IT users, than for design or media users. Once IT administrators are confident that they can integrate Macs into their infrastructure, the door is opened for wider scale adoption. With significant misgivings over Vista, readily available Mac VM software and continuing Windows security concerns, removing the biggest barrier to entry – a Mac cynical IT department, will lead to a significant increase in the number of Macs in enterprise.

There is another key user group that will help to drive adoption – gadget hungry executives. As key executives increasingly purchase Macs for their own use, they will demand full access to their corporate infrastructure. Again IT departments will prioritise keeping this user group happy, further weakening barriers to entry.

Combined with the “one” feature of Snow Leopard being better Exchange integration, Apple stands well placed to take advantage of a “perfect storm” of iPhone developers, executive decision makers and a weakened Microsoft to finally make that breach into the enterprise computing market. The question is whether they will listen to enterprise demands for the Mac, in the same way as they have listened to their iPhone demands.

It also opens an opportunity for Mac software developers to develop enterprise class business software, a market segment where the Mac currently suffers. Products like Differencia will hopefully be well placed to help Apple win new business.

If you are interested, please email david at macmacdev dot com. Further details and updates can be found at the MacMacDev website.

There are already 8-9 attendees, so a healthy number. More the merrier, so please let David know if you would like to come along too.

Selecting a numerical field in CSSEdit such as Margin, Padding or Width, allows you to adjust the positioning of elements on your webpage. The live preview shows your changes immediately.

But the stand out feature is that if you hover your mouse over the selected field, you can use the mouse’s scroll wheel to adjust the value. This makes it phenomenally easy to fine tune the position of elements, to make them pixel perfect.

I primarily use Coda for my web development and although Coda has a built in CSS editor, it just doesn’t compare to CSSEdit. Which is perhaps why Panic, Coda’s creators, wanted to include CSSEdit within Coda, in the same way as they incorporate SubEthaEdit as the text editor in the app. It is a shame the two parties were not able to come to an agreement.

Here’s kudos to MacRabbit for great attention to detail, that makes a huge difference to users. Whilst Mac software developers need to remember the 80-20 rule to deliver, we still need to remember the other 20%. It should only been delayed to deliver the 80%, but still needs to be tackled to make our apps that extra bit special for our users.

Since moving to Scotland 18 months ago, I have been surprised by the number of Mac developers based here. I had heard of the Silicon Glen, the idea that there are a number of tech related companies in Scotland, but it was a great surprise to find so many Mac developers here. It makes a huge difference to have a local community, as well as a strong online one.

Glasgow meetings are planned for the 4th / last Thursday of every month, with the next one on 29th May.

Edinburgh meetings are planned for the 2nd Thursday of every month, with the next meeting planned for June 12th. Whilst this is during Apple’s developer conference, WWDC, there should still be a good attendance. Exact venue is yet to be confirmed, and the best place to keep an eye on things is the MacMacDev Website

There are also plans afoot to have a MacMacDev meet up at WWDC, details yet to be confirmed, which will be a good opportunity of East and West coasters to meet up to compare notes.

There’s an egg somewhere on this site and to start looking for more, click on the image below:

This might feel quite unseemly and create a negative image of the Mac developer community amongst our customer base. It may even suggest that there is some fragility in the traditionally zealot-like support for the Mac. As I suggested in “The Year of Hubris“, there is certainly a new willingness to criticise Apple, by its customers and developers.

Should customers be worried? Should Developers keep their arguments private? Or is Daniel Jakult right, when he suggests that the developer community is still one big happy family?

Well, I would argue “No” in all cases. The infighting amongst Mac developers signals the end of a siege mentality. We are no longer worried that Apple may go bust, that the Mac may disappear as a product and our beloved platform will be swamped by Windows. For the last decade, or more, the Mac community has stuck together to defend their platform. Now that the Mac market is buoyant, Apple is financially healthy and the future looks bright, the need for solidarity is gone.

In fact the Mac market is large enough and growing at such a pace, that there is room again for multiple competing products. Developers want to do their best to differentiate their products, and promote their approach to their customers, as being “better than the next guy”. In short, traditional market forces have come into play.

As with any good, transparent, competitive market, competition is a great thing for customers. It means that developers are desperately fighting to improve their products to steal a march on their competitors. All of the arguments are centred around what is best for customers. Customers who now have a genuine choice.

Why the sudden change? After all Apple has been financially healthy, and the Mac market has been growing, for quite some time. I would suggest that the speed, success and mere fact of the Intel transition has been the catalyst. Apple is no longer one failed delivery from its chip vendor away from disaster. Intel is a reliable partner, and if they stumble, AMD and IBM are waiting in the wings. I have been nervously waiting for a bake off showing how much faster Windows is than OS X on the same hardware. Instead we discover that a Mac is, in fact, the fastest Vista capable laptop.

If the Mac developers stop arguing, start worrying. In the mean time, sit back and enjoy the fireworks.

Differencia

Accessorizer, Kevin Callahan. Accessorizer has been of great use, however it doesn’t seem to be under active development, so I will probably be moving to customising Xcode’s existing accessor scripts.

Code Collector Pro, M-Cubed Software. A useful little utility. Whilst I only needed the free version, I purchased the Pro version as I thought Martin Pilkington’s business model was a little bit flawed. He should really be charging for both versions of his product, or drop the free version completely.

FileStorm, MindVision. Simple, straight forward app for creating disk images with background images and licences. A little bit confusing getting the sizing of the window correct the first time, but once the settings are correct, it works great.

svnX, La Chose Interactive. Occasionally Xcode 2′s Source Control system doesn’t cut it, and I need to get a wider overview than the command line can give, so I dip into svnX as my preferred Subversion GUI Client. However with Xcode 3′s improved source control features and my intention to migrate to Git, svnX has unfortunately got a limited life in my tool set.

Graphics

OmniGraffle, The Omni Group. I have employed graphic designers for most of the graphics work for Differencia and the website, but for simple graphics that I feel that I can create myself, I have generally used OmniGraffle. I have had a play with Acorn and have been a long time user of Graphics Converter as well.

iPhoto Library Manager, Fat Cat Software. A great utility that allowed me to keep website and Differencia graphics separate from my main iPhoto library.

Can Combine Icons, ITTPOI. A great little utility that helped to create document icons for Differencia. Again, it seems that it is no longer under active development, which is a shame as it will not be able to create Leopard high resolution Icons files, but it has been really useful up until this point.

Website

Coda, Panic. The harsh reality of Web Development is that WYSIWYG editing is just not possible for anything but simple, template driven websites, without the sledgehammer, expensive, DreamWeaver. Coda is a happy compromise that simplifies web development as far as it can go. I’ve slowly come to really appreciate Coda, as it takes out as much pain from web development as is possible.

CSSEdit, Mac Rabbit. Although Coda includes a CSS Editor, I purchased CSSEdit quite some time ago and still use it, as it is still considerably better than Coda for CSS. CSSEdit has fantastic attention to detail, but more on that in a future post.

MarsEdit, Red Sweater Software. I initially wondered why I would need a Blog Editor for a single Blog. That was until I had to use come to terms with the online editor included with WordPress. With MarsEdit, you really do blog more.

ChronoSync, Econ Technologies. As with many web hosts, 1 & 1 do not provide automated backups for site content. ChronoSync has been an excellent tool for keeping the DayTime website reliably backed up.

MacFusion, Michael Gorbach. Occasionally I dip into direct access to the website’s file system when I need to do something that Coda or ChronoSync can’t handle. MacFusion is an excellent way to do this easily.

Planning

OmniOutliner, The Omni Group. Omni Outliner is one of my favourite applications and I have put it to all sorts of uses. I have, like many others, been using the OmniFocus betas and as of yesterday will be switching to it full time for planning. However, as project manager, the state of Mac project management tools is sadly disappointing and OmniPlan is unfortunately the best of a bad bunch, in my opinion. So in the mean time, I will make do with OmniOutliner or OmniFocus for task planning.

FogBugz, Fog Creek Software. For bug & feature request tracking, I use FogBugz. There is a little publicised, free, hosted version of the software for start-ups & students. You sign up for the trial and when it expires you can “downgrade” to the free version.

TimeOut, Dejal. Staring at a computer monitor all day can be a real strain and can do a lot of damage to the eyes, along with the risk of RSI. TimeOut is a simple utility that helps you to take regular breaks, when you might otherwise be engrossed in work.

Colloquy. Colloquy has been the sanity saviour, allowing contact with other Mac developers, either for help and advice, or simply for a bit of mindless chat to help take a break from work.