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So this past Christmas, when I had some time to spare, I took the plunge and of course, as expected, not everything worked after.

It took me a few days to get everything back up and running so I’ve noted down some things below to help any other designers/developers who have still to make the jump.

Backup your development databases

Should go without saying but here’s your reminder anyway. Backup everything.

Specifically, back up your local databases. For handiness, backup/copy your MySQL databases (located under /usr/local/mysql/data) to your desktop. You’ll want to use these shortly after upgrading.

Sidenote: How to open /usr/ in Finder

I’m usually lost when it comes to working in Terminal. I prefer to see folders in Finder.

In case you didn’t know how to locate and open any hidden folders like /usr/ do the following:

1. Open Terminal.app
2. Type: cd /usr/
3. Type: open .

Simple when you know how.

Install/Upgrade to Snow Leopard

Follow the on screen instructions. Should be simple enough and takes a little less than 1 hour.

Install MySQL

Go to MySQL.com and download the latest version of MySQL.

Just to confuse you there are a few options. Go for the DMG Archive. You’re most likely looking for the 64-bit but check first to make sure.

Once downloaded, install MySQL (along with the Startup Item and Preference Pane).

Restore your development databases

At this point we have MySQL installed but we don’t have any data.

You want to copy the data folder that we previously backed up into your new MySQL folder.

I found this link helpful from Corey. Restore development databases after Snow Leopard upgrade.

In short:

1. Turn off MySQL (use the Preference Pane)
2. Replace /usr/local/mysql/data with your backed up data folder
3. Turn on MySQL

MySQL is nearly all set

At this point I tried one of my PHP sites locally however it didn’t work.

Thanks to Aaron’s solution here, I was able to get it up and running.

1. Open Terminal.app
2. Type: sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server
3. Find the line starting with basedir and datadir and replace with:
   basedir=/usr/local/mysql
   datadir=/usr/local/mysql/data
4. Save the file
5. Start MySQL using the System Preferences pane button.

Installing Ruby, rvm and Rails

This is where I got completely lost and wasted a couple of days trying to troubleshoot and get things up and running.

I installed rvm, ruby and the rails gem but couldn’t get any local applications to run for one reason or another (usually some sort of gem problem).

In the end I had to give in and ask for help from the talented Mr David Rice, whose conclusion was to do a clean install.

1. Remove RVM
2. Remove Ruby
3. Install Xcode if you haven’t already done so (p.s. it’s a big ass file)
4. Install git, RVM, Ruby and Rails

Hopefully this is you up and running.

Should it be this difficult?

I’m not a developer so I was lost quite a bit along the way. Running commands in Terminal is a task in itself.

It seems to be different for everyone so the process above might not be exactly the same for you. And if you’re a developer you might be saying to yourself “Why did he need to do that?”. Tell me if anything above looks odd.

If someone can create a button that once clicked, installs everything you need (in all the right places) to get a Rails project running locally, that would be great thanks.

Big thanks to David Rice for his help and to all the websites mentioned above. Stackoverflow is your friend in situations like this.

I thought it was about time I updated this list with any new apps I’ve started using but turns out I’ve been using pretty much the same lot since then.

Here are 5 new apps I’ve been introduced to during that time and now use daily.

1. Google Chrome

Firefox was once my choice but for some reason it started running very slow for me. I’d especially find YouTube videos very jumpy. So one day I tried out Chrome and absolutely loved it. It’s light weight, fast and trim.

After I sourced a few extensions I use often (namely Delicious and EyeDropper) I fully switched over my default browser.

Chrome also renders with the WebKit engine so you get all the nice CSS3 and HTML5 goodies (that also come with Safari).

I still tend to keep Firefox open though. It’s hard to beat that Developer Toolbar and Firebug. I also prefer the autocomplete that comes with the Firefox web address bar.

If you’re asking “What about Safari?” I never really got using it – an earlier version used to crash on me quite a lot which put me off it.

2. Mailplane

Only started using this recently for managing emails. I have 4 different GMail accounts for different domains that I was continually checking and had tabs open in the browser for (I wanted to keep them separate).

Mailplane is a desktop app but with the same look and feel and interaction as GMail has in the browser. It has some niceties like a top toolbar and ‘neater’ switching between accounts.

3. TweetDeck

This is my Twitter client of choice. Some people really dislike it, and to be honest it doesn’t scream of the typical nice UI you get with Mac apps, but I find it really handy for keeping track of multiple accounts and groups of people.

Also nice integration with other social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, even FourSquare.

4. MacJournal

MacJournal actually came part of a MacHeist bundle and I find it really useful for taking daily notes. I now use it to keep track of:

• Meetings (what was discussed)
• Events (what was talked about)
• Books (overviews and key notes)
• Workshops (what I learned)

Great for referring back to. In the past I would have recorded these things in a notebook, which would eventually be lost, forgot about or binned.

5. LittleSnapper

LittleSnapper was also part of a MacHeist bundle. Useful for taking screenshots of web pages and nice graphics then keeping them to hand for inspiration.

I wish I could say I had a really neat and nicely configured LittleSnapper for all areas of inspiration but I never get around to organising it (except once when I did it on a plane).

What would you recommend?

I’m sure there are tonnes of apps out there that I haven’t tried and should be using.

If you were to recommend one really good app that I haven’t mentioned, what would it be?

There’s no use case

I have no use for the iPad. So many times I’ve “tried to fit it into my life” but it never really caught on.

A £400/£500 gadget shouldn’t be something you try to fit into your life. It should just fit. When I bought my first MacBook Pro a couple years back, it fitted perfectly. When I purchased an iPhone, it fitted perfectly. These things allowed me to be more efficient and productive. The iPad doesn’t do that.

I’ve struggled to find a use case for it. The best I’ve found is reading the Sun in bed when I wake up in the morning. That’s a damn expensive newspaper, considering you still have to pay a monthly subscription for the newspaper on top of the initial app purchase.

I’ve also tried browsing the web while in front of the TV, but again I rely to much on my “work environment”. As a web designer I’m never just browsing, I’m usually doing some sort of work on the computer that involves a host of other apps.

iPad apps suck

I have yet to discover an iPad app that ‘wows’ me. Yes there are lots of beautifully designed apps from a lot of talented developers but nothing has stuck out as a ‘must have’.

If you ask someone with an iPad to recommend some apps, you’ll generally get a response that includes the following.

File sharing apps

What’s the deal with file sharing apps? Haven’t we been sharing files easily for years? Why do we need an app to do this? I can just use my laptop to produce the files I need and remove the need to ‘share’ them or sync them from the iPad.

Reading apps

I tried to read books on the iPad. I have to admit it is a lot better than I thought it would be, but you still can’t beat a physical book.

I prefer lifting a book, highlighting key lines with a highlighter, bending a page corner and setting that beside my bed as a reminder to read it. A digital book doesn’t replace that.

RSS readers

When it comes to reading RSS feeds, if I come across a useful article I’ll tag in on delicious. If it’s really useful, I’ll share it on Twitter, or I’ll open up TextMate or Photoshop to make something. I can do these things no problem on the MacBook Pro but on the iPad it can’t be done or in the case of sharing on Twitter, it involves opening and closing apps.

Why is it so successful?

The iPad failed for me but it certainly hasn’t seemed to have failed Apple.

Apple indicates that it has sold 3.27 million iPads as of June 26. That translates to more than $2 billion in revenue for the company in a product category that didn’t even exist one year ago.

The above is a recent extract from Mashable.

A few good use cases or suitable personas I can think of include:

• People who travel a lot – it’s lighter than a laptop, has longer battery life, so is useful for email management and web browsing if traveling regularly
• Sales people – if you go out to pitch to potential customers regularly or give one to one presentations on a regular basis it is quite useful

Is it a fail in the long run?

Apple have introduced this new product to the market, and being the first company to do so has contributed to its success. It’s a new toy, a new era, so people are jumping on board and trying to justify its existence.

One year from now we’ll surely see a certain ‘type’ of person who relies heavily on the iPad, but right now I’m not sure who that will be.

For me, I’d prefer to sell the iPad (which I have done) and upgrade to an iPhone 4 (which I plan on doing).

Have you got an iPad? Do you want one? What do you really think of it?

I’m sure there are more useful resources that I’ve missed so if you think you can recommend anything else, leave me a comment and I’ll update accordingly.

Web/Techy blogs and meetups

Belfast Open Coffee Club

BOCC is an informal tech meeting that happens once or twice per month. Chat about web apps and iPhones over coffee and cake.

Digital Circle

Digital Circle is an association of digital media businesses that help to develop, connect and promote the industry.

NI Creatives

Great resource to keep you informed about what’s happening in NI.

MobileMonday Belfast

MobileMonday brings together industry professionals interested in mobile.

Northern Ireland Mac User Group

NiMUG provides support to Apple users and have monthly meetings.

Digital Media Island

Digital Media Island is an enterprise network that develops and administers enterprise resources for companies in the digital media industry in Ireland.

Crea8ivity

Northern Ireland’s creative digital hub.

Web Designire

Showcase of creative web designs coming from Ireland and Northern Ireland.

NI Tech Blog

The latest tech news from Northern Ireland.

Events to keep an eye on

BarCamp

An open techy/web event where anyone is welcome to present.

CreativeCamp

A similar event to BarCamp but with a broader creative reach i.e. you don’t have to be ‘tech savvy’.

Build

Coming to Belfast later this year, Build is an exciting new web conference.

FOWA Dublin

The Future of Web Apps is coming to Dublin in March 2009. Keep track of Carsonifed for future events.

Business meetups

NISP Connect

Northern Ireland Science Park have a variety of events and competitions, including monthly frameworks classes that are free to attend (and often include bacon buddies).

Creative Entrepreneurs Club

CECNI brings creative entrepreneurs together at various networking events.

Free Wi-Fi hotspots in Belfast

Free Wi-Fi spots include;

• Sinnamon, Stranmillis
• Charlies, Bradbury Place
• The Limelight, Ormeau Avenue
• Ground, Fountain Avenue
• Roast, Royal Avenue
• Roast, Lisburn Road
• Bookfinders, University Road

What else is happening?

Feel free to leave a comment below with more suggestions.

However, I was having trouble accessing my MAMP server through Parallels. I use Parallels to test my sites on Internet Explorer and it’s pretty important that I’m able to do this in development before going live.

I found this excellent solution from Tim Fletcher and thought I’d summarize it below so you too can get testing your Wordpess, CodeIgniter, PHP sites etc. through Parallels.

1. Install Bonjour for Windows

Download and install (in your Windows OS) Apple’s Bonjour For Windows.

2. Enable file sharing

Now back in Mac OSX, enable file sharing. System Preferences > Sharing > File Sharing.

3. Change your computer name

From the ‘Sharing’ window you have open, change your computers name to localhost.local.

4. Change your Apache and MySQL ports in MAMP

Run MAMP and open up ‘Preferences’. Change the Apache Port to 80 and the MySQL Port to 3306

N.B. Make sure there are no other instances of MySQL running.

5. Configure your framework

Change the settings on your framework to reflect the new settings.

The example I’ve used here is WordPress. Change your WordPress address (& blog address) to http://localhost.local (Settings > General).

Volia!

You should now be able to access your site from your Parallels Windows environment using the URL http://localhost.local and you can test your site in IE.

Back in June when I was converting from a PC to a MacBook Pro (best decision I ever made) I asked around to see what apps people recommended for the Mac. There are a lot of nice apps available for Mac OSX that aren’t available for Windows.

I’ve compiled a list of Mac Apps I have in my OSX dock that I use on a daily basis and should be useful to other Mac users and/or web designers.

1. Adobe Creative Suite

An obvious and primary requirement (I feel) all serious web designers should have. I couldn’t get through the day without Photoshop while Illustrator and Flash are constantly called upon. I hear Fireworks is good too, especially for compressing images, but I’ve yet to use it myself.

2. Transmit

Transmit is an FTP client for Mac. Edit remote files, synchronize, search, SSL, tabs; it covers all your daily FTP needs.

3. Coda

Coda is a light-weight all in one text editor. You can edit your code, preview your web page, upload to server (integration with Transmit), edit CSS and run commands in Terminal; all from within this one app. I would use Coda for front-end development.

4. Textmate

Textmate is another text editor that I prefer using for back-end development. Code completion, snippets, syntax colouring are some of the things I enjoy about Textmate along with ease of customizing fonts and colours.

5. CocoaMySQL

CocoaMySQL gives you an interface to work with your MySQL databases. This is a desktop alternative to PHPMyAdmin, which is a lot quicker and in my opinion a lot easier to operate.

UPDATE 13/12/08: CocoaMySQL has been abandoned and replaced with Sequel Pro. Works just as well and looks even better. Check it out.

6. MAMP

MAMP is an easy way to get Apache, MySQL and PHP up and running on your machine. Just by running MAMP all these three services will be up and running, no messing around in Terminal needed.

7. Things

Great app for getting things done. Set yourself project tasks and daily tasks and check them off as and when you get them done.

8. CSS Edit

A very good CSS editor. It allows for real time previews of your website and styles and is a very efficient app allowing you to easily find all styles being applied to certain elements.

9. Transmission

Transmission is used for downloading/uploading torrents over the net. Useful for sharing files with friends and colleagues (among other things)

10. MarsEdit

MarsEdit allows you to compile draft blog posts on your local machine before publishing them live on your blog. I use it daily to take notes on various blog topics I think of and then I can easily compile a blog post over the course of a week.

11. Skitch

I was only recently introduced to this by GoodOnPaper @ FOWA. Allows you to easily share images/screenshots on the web and using the Skitch editor you can add notes to your image or highlight areas of a screenshot. Very useful and saves having to load up Photoshop for simple tasks.

12. Parallels Desktop

You can run Windows XP or Vista on your Mac using Parallels. Handy for being able to test your websites in versions of IE (using Multiple IEs) and if there are any Windows only apps you need to use, e.g. Microsoft Access.

13. Office

A good old favorite for creating text documents, preparing slideshows or looking after sets of data. There are a few Mac alternatives, and of course online alternatives, but I personally prefer Office.

14. Paparazzi

Paparazzi takes full screenshots of webpages. The problem with Cmd+Shift+3 is that it only takes a screenshot of the visible screen. Paparrazi takes the whole height of the page, even below the fold, so it’s great for showing screenshots of your web designs.

15. Twitterific

Easily interact with Twitterland via Twitterific. Saves you having to make the trip to Twitter to see what’s going on as it can retrieve and send tweets for you.

Others worth looking at

• Firefox Firefox is a fantastic browser with fantastic extensions for web designers like Web Developer Toolbar and FireBug
• Pixelmator Cheap alternative to Photoshop
• Lineform Cheap alternative to Illustrator
• Flickr Uploader Easily upload your photos to Flickr
• Skype Have your conference calls for free over the web

What apps do you use?

Let me know what apps you find useful and you think should be included in the list above.

Settings

Host:localhost
User:root
Password:root

If you try to connect now you may get the following error:
Unable to connect to host localhost.
Be sure that the address is correct and that you have the necessary privileges.
MySQL said: Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ (using password: YES)

Solution

So here’s the extra bit. Enter the following in the socket field:
/applications/mamp/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

Happy days!