Apple explorer IE IE6 IE7 internetexplorer leopard mac Mac OS X MacOSX osx parallels tiger windows
by Ariejan de Vroom
leave a comment
Run Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, 6 and 7 natively on Mac OS X Leopard or Tiger
As a web developer, you probably know all about browsers. They suck. Well, some more than others. But, if you develop apps for Windows users, you’ll have to test your app with Internet Explorer.
Now, as a good Rails developer, I’m using a Mac. I can test apps with FireFox, Safari and Opera without problems. But Internet Explorer is always a problem. I used Parallels for a while to run an instance of Windows XP to test with IE. But this in itself presented me with a problem: you can’t, without nasty hacks and a lot of trouble, run IE6 en IE7 side-by-side.
My only option seemed to run two Parallels sessions, one with IE6, the other with IE7. Since every images takes about 5 Gb of disk space, I just wasted 10 Gb of disk space to test web apps with Internet Explorer. This is kind of ridiculous.
But, now there is a very, very nice solution to this problem that every Mac-oriented web developer should know about: ies4osx This solution uses darwine (±70Mb), a wine version for OS X, using X11 and allows you to install IE 5, 5.5, 6 and even IE7. All at once, right in Mac OS X. You can run any of these browsers, from the same system, all at once in parallel!
Although this allows me to use Internet Explorer the way I want it to, I’m still not a fan…
Buy it now! Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
It appears that Amazon is accepting pre-orders for Apple Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard
There are, as usual two version available, Apple Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard
If you want to be sure you have the latest version of
Installing RMagick Ruby Gem on Mac OS X 10.4.9
When you want to manipulate images with Ruby (or your Rails application) you’ll probably want RMagick installed. This is no easy feat on Mac OS X.
The official guide suggests installing X11 and using darwinports to install everything. This guide shows you how to easily install RMagick on you Mac OS X system. In this case I use Mac OS X 10.4.9.
more »
Install ruby-mysql on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
You probably know that the built-in mysql code in Rails sucks. To rephrase that, the ruby-mysql gem contains better code, so you want that. Rails automatically detects if you have ruby-mysql installed or not, and uses it if you have it.
Most notably, you want to install this gem if you get dropped MySQL connections running your Rails application.
So we do:
$ sudo gem install mysql ... ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
Normall this would install fine, but not on Mac OS X. This is because Mac OS X keeps its code, headers and libraries in odd places (compared to Linux). But don’t panic. There’s an easy solution to all this!
more »