Category: Mac

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Mac

2011 MacBook Air – Web Developer’s Dream Rig?

Apple has released new 2011 MacBook Air models, sporting zippy Intel Core i5 or i7 processors, fast flash storage instead hard disks, and the capacity to drive large external displays. Are these ultra thin and light a web developer’s dream machine?

Photo of a MacBook 2011 from above-front.
MacBook Air 2011 - Dream Machine?

The short answer is yes!

Being light and small, the MacBook Air is very easy to move around. It’s almost no effort to bring along to a meeting. Or if you’re working long hours, and need a change of scene, it’s so easy to shift to another desk, a couch, or a bench by a river.

They make the Air so small and thin by going wireless and cutting out the Ethernet port, chopping the hard disk for flash storage chips, as well as really clever design. It’s the sexiest laptop I’ve ever handled. Apple still manages to squeeze on two USB 2.0 ports, and – only on the 13 inch model – an SD card slot. And you can get an Ethernet port via USB or Thunderbolt if you need it.

The screen is bright and clear. The MBA can drive big screens: I tested the MacBook Air driving a 27 inch Apple LED Cinema Display with above HD 1080p resolution – see “Can a MacBook Air 2011 run a large external display?” for videos.

The graphics processor is integrated onto the same chip as the CPU. It’s fine for most 2D work: web development, Photoshop and amateur video editing. For Final Cut Motion, Adobe After Effects, 3D modelling or games, you’d want a 15 or 17 inch MacBook Pro with their strong graphics processors.

Battery life is five hours of web browsing for the 11 inch model and seven hours for the 13 inch. Push it harder, for example by encoding video, or turn up the display brightness and the MacBook Air will live less long.

Flash on websites can take a third off the MacBook Air’s battery, which is probably why Apple doesn’t ship the Air with Flash installed. If you want to prolong your battery life, and keep your Air cool and quiet (not hot and with fan noise) there’s a click-to-run Flash solution. There’s other tricks that can double your battery life; see MacBook Air battery life for more info.

The new Core i5 or i7 processors replace the late 2010 MacBook Air’s Core 2 Duo processors. The Core 2 Duos were power efficient, but a bit slow by modern standards. These new CPUs are fast, on par with last year’s MacBook Pro, but drinking much less battery. Which one to get? See MacBook Air i5 vs i7.

The solid state disk (SSD) is fast. It makes the Air really responsive. No waiting for the whir & grind of a hard disk. Apple used Toshiba and Samsung to supply the flash memory chips. The Samsung is faster, but there’s no knowing which you’ll get.

The MacBook Air sports a Thunderbolt port. It’s the same as the Mini Display Port on previous Macs, but adds the facility for one gigabyte per second of data transfer with peripherals – each way (i.e. 2GBps). Plug it into Apple’s new Thunderbolt Display, and the display works like a docking station. The Thunderbolt Display provides a Gigabit Ethernet port, a Firewire 800 port, three USB 2.0 ports, and another Thunderbolt plot to add more high speed peripherals, like disk arrays.

The new MacBook Air comes preloaded with Mac OS X Lion. Lion is fast, responsive & good looking. The emphasis on full screen apps and fading-away scrollbars makes as much of the screen as possible available for work. Lion includes Apache and the latest PHP version available at the time (5.3.6). OS X is Unix underneath, so there’s all the useful shell commands ready to go, and it’s much closer software-environment-wise to the Linux servers many of us deploy to than that other very popular operating system.

So picture this: You have a fast, thin laptop. Take anywhere. Weighs almost nothing. It’s capable – you can do serious work on it. Bring it to work, plug in a tiny Thunderbolt connector. Your tiny Mac is suddenly driving giant display, office gigabit Ethernet and a big disk array. A full workstation. Later, going home, unplug and your super portable again.

Sound good? I think the 2011 MacBook Air is a web developer’s dream machine. Now the only decision is MacBook Air 11 vs 13 inch.

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Mac

Mac Moves to PHP 5.3.6 With Release of OS X Lion

With Apple‘s release of OS X Lion, the bundled version of PHP has been updated to PHP 5.3.6, the very latest production version of PHP.

PHP 5.3 includes features like:

  • namespaces,
  • lambda funtions,
  • late static binding, and
  • a native mysql driver, mysqlnd.

This is good news for web developers using Mac. If we want to work the latest PHP release, we don’t have to resort to installing a separate version of PHP, using a tool like MacPorts.

Probably the fact that Lion is only available as a download through the Apple App Store has helped Apple ship with the latest PHP version.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard currently uses PHP 5.3.4, even with the latest 10.6.8 update.

A PHP 5.4 Alpha has just been released, with useful features like traits. I wonder whether Apple will update to PHP 5.4 during Lion’s lifetime? I can only hope.

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Mac

Mac OS X Lion: Useful Features, Compatibility, Upgrade Requirements, Install Time

Mac OS X 10.7, codenamed Lion was released on 20 July 2011. I’ve just upgraded my MacBook Air to Lion. Lion is … quite a lot of awesomeness bundled together.

On OS X Lion, even "About This Mac" is better
On OS X Lion, even "About This Mac" is better

Useful Features of Lion

Here’s some I love about Lion and am using all the time:

New cool stuff everywhere: There’s just great little touches everywhere. Even About This Mac is better, showing how much space different types of files are using on your hard disk, just like for an iPod when it’s plugged in for syncing to iTunes (see screenshot). I accidentally quit the Preview app without saving a screenshot. When I next started Preview, there it was waiting for me. All the Apple Apps now just pickup where I last left them. After getting really used to “the usual”, it’s quite exciting stumbling over all these useful improvements.

Full screen apps: Just click a two headed arrow in the top-right corner of a window, and it expands to take the whole screen, with the menu bar shrinking away. The major Mac apps have been upgraded to support full screen mode, like Safari, iPhone, iTunes, Mail, iCal, Preview and it works with some third party apps like Chrome. To sweep between full screen apps, just slide three fingers horizontally across the trackpad. Ahhhh – iPad like simplicity, just focus on one task at a time. And get the whole screen for useful work.

Scrolling reinvented: Scroll bars tend to disappear in Lion. In Safari and the Finder they’re not there until I scroll with the trackpad or arrow keys. The scroll bars fade in while I’m scrolling and quickly disappear. This gives more visible area for content, be it a web page or picture thumbnails in the Finder. So you don’t panic at the lack of scroll bars, the Lion welcome app makes sure it tells you how to scroll with two fingers on the trackpad. Two finger scrolling is in the opposite direction to Snow Leopard, matching the iPhone and iPad. (This can be reversed.) When you scroll past the end, there’s a bouncing effect also a la iPad. While there is an adjustment, it feels more tactile & intuitive. Basically Lion takes the best elements of the iPhone experience (focus on one thing, get the interface out of the way) and starts to bring this to the Mac.

Mission Control: Swipe up with three fingers and I can clearly see all my windows, full screen apps and the dock, with windows from the same app stacked together, and the app icon on the bottom edge of the stacked windows. Just click to pick which window you want. Quick, clear, easy, awesome.

Eye Candy: Lion improves the Mac’s graphical interface. It feels lighter & cleaner, more refined, yet more friendly. It not obvious. I can’t quite put my finger on the changes – the progress bar pulses and it lighter, window corners seem different sometimes, the shadows are better perhaps, Finder icons have been revised, elements slide, move, contract and expand… The elements aren’t obvious, but collectively Lion feels quite different to previous OS X releases.

Lion looks and feels different. It’s got more life in it. It’s simpler, lighter, more effective more fun.

Lion Application Compatibility

Application compatibility has been good so far. I’ve tested Firefox, Opera, Chrome & Outlook. I still need to test Word, Excel, Photoshop and the like. An app I use to stream music throughout my house – Airfoil – falls over after suspend, but I’ve got no doubt that will be fixed very soon. My PHP configuration got broken by the Lion upgrade, taking down a WordPress site I working on, but that’s fixed now.

How to Get Lion

Mac OS X Lion is available only through the Mac App Store. Go the the Apple menu, choose the third item down “App Store…“.

Requirements to Upgrade to Lion

You need to be running Mac OS Snow Leopard 10.6.6 or higher, and have 4GB of free disk space to upgrade to Lion.

Lion Download

Lion downloaded ridiculously quickly for me, at almost 10 megabytes per seconds. Apple’s obviously done the work so if you’ve got a fast Internet connection, they’ll use every bit of it.

Time to Install Lion

It took about 40 minutes to install on my MacBook Air 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo.

Lion Pricing

Pricing is $29.99 in the U.S. and AUD$31.99 in Australia.

Performance

All the new Lion features respond smoothly & quickly on my late-2010 MacBook Air. My Air runs Core 2 Duo 1.6 GHz., which is a slow processor compared to current Macs like the mid-2011 MacBook Air with a i5 or i7. Macs made in the last couple of years should run Lion well.

Conclusion

I highly recommend upgrading to Lion! It’s a big upgrade to OS X with lots of useful improvements you’ll use daily. I’m meant to keep my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard so I can test on Snow Leopard, but to be honest, I don’t think I can resist upgrading.

If you found this article useful please comment, or click the Tweet or +1 buttons – thank you!

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Mac

Where are the Apache Configuration files on Mac? – httpd.conf

Here’s where to find httpd.conf on Mac. This is the httpd.conf location on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. This article also shows how to make the httpd.conf directory visible in the Mac Finder.

What is Httpd.conf?

Httpd.conf is the Apache web server’s main configuration file. Mac OSX ships with Apache installed. See Apache’s configuration docs for how to configure Apache.

Httpd.conf Location on Mac

On Mac httpd.conf location is in the directory /etc/apache2. You can access this folder through the Mac Finder or through the Mac Terminal.

Checked on OS X 10.7, 10.6.8, 10.6.7.

Httpd.conf Location in Mac Finder

You won’t normally see even the /etc/apache2 directory showing up in the Mac Finder. I tried looking in Macintosh HD, but /etc doesn’t show up.)

I found a tip at Codejacked on how to open hidden files in the Finder.

Here’s how to view httpd.conf’s directory in the Mac’s finder:

  1. In the Finder, click the Go menu, and choose Go to Folder…
  2. Type in /etc/apache2.
  3. Click Go.

The Finder will show the apache2 folder, and in it, you’ll see httpd.conf.

Httpd.conf Location in Mac Terminal

You can also get to the httpd.conf file through a terminal session, which is okay if your comfortable in the Unix shell (bash):

tazpro:~ taz$ cd /etc/apache2

tazpro:apache2 taz$ ls
extra		magic		original	users
httpd.conf	mime.types	other

Can’t Save Httpd.conf?

Httpd.conf is protected by OSX from being edited. If you open it with the TextEdit application for example, you won’t be able to save it. For details to bypass this security, see How to Easily Edit Httpd.conf on Mac.

Restart Apache to Apply Configuration Changes

Don’t forget you will need to restart Apache for your configuration changes in httpd.conf to be applied. To restart Apache on Mac:

  1. Go to the Apple menu and choose System Preferences.
  2. Click on Sharing.
  3. Untick Web Sharing.
  4. Tick Web Sharing.
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Mac

How to Change a Mac’s Name in Four Clicks

Changing a Mac’s name is easy. Here’s how to change a Mac’s computer name is four clicks. A Mac name change will affect the name that other computers see when they’re browsing the local network.

I’ve tested this method on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (10.6.7 and 10.6.8).

The Mac computer name is sometimes called a network name,  or even a host name or hostname, which comes from OS X’s origins in Unix.

Here’s how to change a Mac’s name:

  1. Click and hold the Apple menu and choose System Preferences…
    To open the Apple menu, click on the Apple icon at the top left of the screen.
    The System Preferences window will open.
  2. Click the Sharing icon.
    The Sharing icon is about the center of the widow.
    It is in the row titled Internet & Wireless.
    The contents of the window will change and
    the window’s title will change to Sharing.
  3. Click in Computer Name field and type the Mac’s new name.
    The Computer Name field is at the top of the window.
  4. Click the red circle at the top left of the Sharing window.
    The Sharing window will close.
    Your Mac’s name will change.

You’re done! – The Mac’s network name is now changed.

The source for this article is Change Your Mac’s Name at Mac Crazy.

This method was tested on Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 (10.6.7).