The Mindful Coder

I don’t know why Apple doesn’t provide the three column layout that MS Outlook, Thunderbird and other clients have built in. On widescreen monitors, there really is no other layout that makes better use of the space available.

I found a nice little Mail plugin that almost satisfies my needs. It’s called Letterbox and is downloadable from http://harnly.net/software/letterbox/. My only gripe – and its probably something Letterbox doesn’t have much control over – is that the layout of the ‘fields’ shown in the middle column don’t work perfect for the 3 column layout. Ideally the way Apple lays out the fields in the middle column should be replaced by how the fields are laid out in Outlook with the date, size etc being shown as sub-text below the from and the subject.

Still works great!

I finally installed Window 7 via bootcamp after trying it out as a VM on my MacBook Pro for a month.

First of course I had to get around theridiculous restriction placed by Apple that bootcamp can be used only if the primary HDD is unpartitioned and is a single logical drive. WTF? How retarded is that? I tried to get clever by partitioning the mac primary partition *after* creating a bootcamp partition and installing Windows. If you do that, bootcamp stops recognizing your Windows partition. Messed up and idiotic but it’s not like Apple is known for listening to users. Anyway, I digress.

So, after I got on Win 7 via bootcamp, my Dell external display wouldn’t work. If I unplugged and plugged it back in via the mini display port, it would get recognized but try as I might, it would not allow me to duplicate or extend my display to the external monitor.

I guessed this was an issue with the nvidia drivers (nvidia GEForce 9600M GT). To fix the issue, download the latest Vista 64bit drivers from nvidia here.

Works just fine after a restart. If your monitor is not recognized even after a restart, unplug and plug it back into the mini-display port.

Note that this fix is for Win7 64bit. I don’t know if the same issue exists for Win7 x86. I would be interested in hearing back from you guys if you found the same issue on Win7 x86 or Vista.

I am used to doing most of my Flex dev on Windows. At home, I do it on my XP VM on my Mac. But I was having a conversation with some friends on Friendfeed a couple of days back about Microsoft having a development bias while Mac had a consumer bias – and during the course of the discussion, it came home to me that I see my Mac as a pleasure boat – and not a platform I want to develop on. I immediately realized this was ridiculous because I have no problem developing on Linux – and the Mac OS is the pretty refined cousin of Linux who hasn’t forgotten her roots.

So I’ve decided to do at least some part of my dev on the Mac. Conveniently, I am currently working on architecting a Flex application for 3D modeling that uses Papervision3d. Flex Builder is Eclipse based and available on the Mac – perfect!

To keep my workspace and files synchronized between my work Windows machine and my Mac at home, I am in the process of setting up Windows Live Mesh. Live Mesh is looking amazing and works pretty flawlessly. The only problem is that their Mac client is still in tech preview and my account doesn’t have authorization yet to use it on the Mac . So I am using my XP VM on the Mac as my conduit to synch for now. I can’t wait for the Mac client to go live. More on how I use Mesh in future posts.

So I opened up my Flex project on the Mac version of Flex Builder 3. You soon realize subtle differences between the Windows and Mac versions of both the Flex Builder and the Flex compiler. Also, since I was using both Mac and Windows, I started mixing up my keyboard shortcuts – got annoying very quickly.

The first issue with using Flex on the mac was that as soon as I tried debugging my app, I got a ‘Security Sandbox Violation’. It was working just fine on Windows.
 

*** Security Sandbox Violation ***
Connection to xxxxxx_frontElev.dae halted – not permitted from file://localhost/Volumes/Anatta/work/xxxxxx/Prototype I/bin-debug/main.swf
SecurityError: Error #2148: SWF file file://localhost/Volumes/Anatta/work/xxxxxxx/Prototype I/bin-debug/main.swf cannot access local resource yyyyy_frontElev.dae. Only local-with-filesystem and trusted local SWF files may access local resources.
    at flash.net::URLStream/load()
    at flash.net::URLLoader/load()
    at org.ascollada.io::DaeReader/read()[/Volumes/Anatta/work/xxxxxxx/xxxxxxx/Libraries/papervision3d_SVN_Checkout/as3/trunk/src/org/ascollada/io/DaeReader.as:76]
    at org.papervision3d.objects.parsers::DAE/load

….

After digging around a little, turns out this was because of the sandbox settings on the Flash player on the Mac.

To fix this,

1. Go to the compiler settings in  your project’s properties via Project->Properties->FlexCompiler
2. In the ‘Additional compiler arguments:” settings, add
   -use-network=false
   
   
3. Click ok.

Should work fine. Hope it saves you some time if you are starting with Flex on the Mac.