Developer
Create Sitemaps with SiteOrbiter
Janet Fouts February 6, 2008
Websites are getting larger and larger, and keeping track of them as they evolve can be a hassle. If you’re a web developer, you’ll want to create what’s called a site map, a special file that lists all of the pages of your website in an hierarchical order. This file can be submitted to search engines to help them index your website. But how the heck are you supposed to create one on your Mac?
Make a Mac Web Server with MAMP and Wordpress
Janet Fouts October 15, 2007
MAMP stands for Mac, Apache, PHP and MySQL, and installing it on your Mac creates a development environment for testing many of our favorite tools. You can do everything from browsing simple PHP files to testing complicated MySQL database driven applications right on your hard drive. Installing MAMP takes just a few minutes. Macinstruct’s Matt Cone created a tutorial on installing MAMP and installing Drupal, so I won’t go into installing MAMP here.
Create a Web Development Environment With MAMP
Matt Cone July 18, 2007
Those of us who have websites know that we need a development environment to work on new features, make changes, and just experiment. If you’re creating static HTML pages, you don’t need much - you can create the pages on your Mac and preview them locally in your web browser or a with WYSIWYG application like iWeb. However, things are a bit more complicated if you’re working with web applications that use PHP and MySQL.
How to Turn Your Mac Into an FTP Server
Matt Cone June 13, 2007
Several weeks ago, we showed you how to turn your Mac into a web server. That article is useful for individuals needing to host web pages on their Mac in a pinch, but it doesn’t really go far enough. After all, any good web server should be remotely accessible - that is, you should be able to add and remove files from your Mac when you’re away from home. You need to turn your Mac into an FTP server!
Use AppleScript to Control Startup Apps
Matt Cone May 21, 2007
You probably know that your Mac can automatically open applications when you turn it on or log into a user account. The problem is that automatically opening Internet-dependent applications (such as iChat or Mail.app) can slow down your Mac if you’re not connected to the internet. To improve your Mac’s startup time, we’ll utilize a simple AppleScript to determine whether or not your Mac is connected to the Internet, and then automatically open selected applications if an Internet connection is present.
Boot Into Windows With Quicksilver
Matt Cone May 14, 2007
If you have an Intel Mac with a Boot Camp partitioned hard drive, you’re probably getting sick of restarting your Mac again and again, just so you can hit the option key to select your Windows partition. In this article, we’ll show you how to create an AppleScript and Quicksilver hotkey that will let you easily restart your Mac and boot into Windows - without the hassle of selecting your partition!
How to Turn Your Mac Into a Web Server
Matt Cone April 26, 2007
Mac OS X is built on Darwin – a Unix-like, open source operating system developed by Apple and built on FreeBSD. This means that Mac users have access to free built-in server applications, like the Apache web server. With Apache and the DynDNS service, you can turn your Mac into a powerful web server. Anyone will be able to access the website stored on your Mac! The best part is that you can host a website on your Mac for free.
Put Internet Images on Your Desktop With Automator
Wayne Linder March 25, 2007
Do you ever get tired of the same old Desktop image? Do you like cool images of space? Have you always wanted to play around with Apple’s Automator? Did you ever wonder if your dentist was the one out of four who didn’t recommend Trident to their patients who chew gum? Well, this article can’t help you with the last item, but if the others intrigued you, read on! In this article, you will learn how to change your Desktop background every day with an image downloaded from NASA’s Cool Astronomy Picture of the Day.
How to Make a Favicon
Stephen Korecky March 15, 2007
Have you ever noticed those little icons in the address bar of your web browser? They also appear next to your bookmarks, and sometimes next to the items in your RSS feeds. These favicons - or “favorites icons” - are more fun to look at than they are functional, but almost every website has one these days. Now, your website can have a favicon, too. It’s easy to make these little icons with your favorite graphics editor.
Roll Your Own Mac App
Matt Cone March 12, 2007
Have you ever wondered how Mac applications are made? Then you’ve come to the right place! This article was written for anyone wanting to get into Mac programming or interface design. We’ll be discussing Cocoa, Apple’s native object-oriented application programming environment for Mac OS X, which is (for the true nerds out there) one of the five major APIs available for Mac OS X. We’ll be using Xcode for all of this.