Happy Valentine’s day 2010!

Last year, 30 German iPhone developers joint their forces and reduced their app prices to the max to make you smile on Valentine’s day … this year everything is bigger: Now more than 80 apps are reduced to the max to please our customers.
CompareMe shopping utility is also available for $0.99. So check out AppsForSale.de maybeyou’ll find a real bargain. Only on 14.02.2010!

rails server

At first, when running on bundler 0.9.3, I had two types of errors. The first NoMethodError populated the terminal with hundreds lines of code, like …

WARNING:  # NoMethodError: undefined method ` ' for nil:NilClass 
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
...
WARNING:  Invalid .gemspec format in \
'.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.1-p378/specifications/spec.gemspec'

The bundler-team around Carlhuda fixed that issue within bundler 0.9.4. So that problem will not occur any more.
The other problem was quite persistent. When starting the server via

rails server

or doing a test via

rake

within the rails-3-project resulted in a bunch of warnings:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:14: \
warning: already initialized constant VERSION
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:14: \
warning: already initialized constant RubyGemsVersion
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:194: \
warning: already initialized constant MUTEX
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:196: \
warning: already initialized constant RubyGemsPackageVersion
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:202: \
warning: already initialized constant WIN_PATTERNS
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:1079:\
 warning: already initialized constant MARSHAL_SPEC_DIR
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:1084: \
warning: already initialized constant YAML_SPEC_DIR
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/version.rb:72: \
warning: already initialized constant VERSION_PATTERN
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/requirement.rb:20: \
warning: already initialized constant OPS
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/requirement.rb:30: \
warning: already initialized constant OP_RE
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/version.rb:246: \
warning: already initialized constant Requirement
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/dependency.rb:18: \
warning: already initialized constant TYPES
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/platform.rb:171: \
warning: already initialized constant RUBY
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/platform.rb:177: \
warning: already initialized constant CURRENT
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:39: \
warning: already initialized constant NONEXISTENT_SPECIFICATION_VERSION
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:50: \
warning: already initialized constant CURRENT_SPECIFICATION_VERSION
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:56: \
warning: already initialized constant SPECIFICATION_VERSION_HISTORY
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:72: \
warning: already initialized constant MARSHAL_FIELDS
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/specification.rb:75: \
warning: already initialized constant TODAY
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/source_index.rb:593: \
warning: already initialized constant Cache
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/config_file.rb:14: \
warning: already initialized constant DEFAULT_BACKTRACE
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/config_file.rb:15: \
warning: already initialized constant DEFAULT_BENCHMARK
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/config_file.rb:16: \
warning: already initialized constant DEFAULT_BULK_THRESHOLD
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/config_file.rb:17: \
warning: already initialized constant DEFAULT_VERBOSITY
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/config_file.rb:18: \
warning: already initialized constant DEFAULT_UPDATE_SOURCES
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/config_file.rb:24: \
warning: already initialized constant OPERATING_SYSTEM_DEFAULTS
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/config_file.rb:30: \
warning: already initialized constant PLATFORM_DEFAULTS
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/config_file.rb:53: \
warning: already initialized constant SYSTEM_WIDE_CONFIG_FILE

Jeremy Kemper from the Rails core team pointed out that this is not a Rails problem, but a RubyGems issue. Ruby 1.9 ships with an outdated RubyGems … like 1.9.1p378 ships with RubyGems 1.3.1. I did update RubyGems to Version 1.3.5 by

sudo gem update --system

but this resulted in some duplicated rubygem files, which cause the error.

So how can the problem be solved? Deleting and reinstalling Ruby 1.9.1 does not have any effect … but the solution is quite simple:

If you already installed Ruby 1.9.1 and Rails 3.0 beta:

1. Be sure that you do NOT install RubyGems 1.3.5 separately after the installation of Ruby 1.9.1 – this would result in a double installation. So have that in mind when following the excellent instructions to installing Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails on Snow Leopard of Dan Benjamin.

2. If you already installed Ruby 1.9.1, updated to RubyGems 1.3.5 and bundler 0.9.4 and also installed Rails 3.0, the only thing you have to do is:

sudo gem uninstall rubygems-update

That’s it. No errors any more!

If you did not install Ruby 1.9.1 and Rails 3.0 yet …

1. You may start with Dan Benjamin’s recipe and modify it so you download, make and install the ruby-1.9.1-p378.tar.gz but NOT the rubygems-1.3.5.tgz.

2. Then update RubyGems with the command

sudo gem update --system

3. Ensure that the rake and the sqlite3-ruby gems are installed, too.

4. Now install the needed gems and rails –pre as described in the Rails 3.0 beta release notes

5. After the successful installation of Rails 3.0 beta, you now have to do the vitally important step:

sudo gem uninstall rubygems-update

6. Finally check, if any gem needs an update before diving into Rails 3.0 by

sudo gem update

Hope this helps … and saves some time. Thx Andy for the hint

Like the legendary Steve Jobs Keynotes in the past, it is quite a tradition that some journalists blog live from the event … so Apple fans all over the planet can take part on the press conference. Here are the most important liveblogs:

• Jason Snell, Dan Moren & Jonathan Seff, Macworld.com
• Jason Chen for Gizmodo
• Erica Ogg for cnet news
• Joshua Topolsky for engadget
• John Paczkowski for All Things Digital
• Technologizer staff for Technologizer
• Ars staff for Ars Technica
• John Biggs for TechCrunch / CrunchGear
• Brian X. Chen for Gadget Lab at Wired

As soon as the videorecording of the event is online as a Quicktime videostream … there’ll be an update

Apple did not announce that the company will be engaged in the e-book or tablet-market – but the rumors about an “iSlate” or “iPad” are quite persistent. Therefore Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer tried to steal Apple the show at his keynote at the CES in Las Vegas: He just renamed the tablet-PCs on stage as “slate-PCs” … but it’s not about a name.

Kindle Development Kit (picture: Amazon)

Amazon is probably in a better starting position in the battle for market shares in the emerging market of Active Content: They have a lot of experience with content distribution with the Kindle and they are in direct contact with the publishers … but Apple has the ability to rouse the e-book-market from slumber by innovation. They may transfer the pathetic e-books into a new and emerging market: Active Content.

There are a lot of advantages for Apple to tip the scales:

• big and growing iPhone SDK developer community … Amazon has to build up a comparable dev community around the KDK
• well-engineered and sophisticated iPhone SDK … with a full bandwidth of network-, graphic-, data- and sensor-support
• color instead of grayscale screens and computing and graphic power
• touchscreen with gestures
• amazing design
• … and there are probably some innovations we don’t expect

Amazon’s move to open up the Kindle to 3rd party developers and create a platform for Active Content is absolutely right … but can it compete with Apples offering? On January 27th 2010 we’ll know much, much more.

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /MAMP/ on this server.
Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) PHP/5.2.11 DAV/2 Server at localhost Port XXXX

That’s a big issue, as the start page links to the local phpMyAdmin page for MySQL-database configuration. So you cannot admin the database anymore.
I traced down the problem to a wrong placed file: When I configured the WordPress installation via the web-interface, an .htaccess file was placed in the root directory of my harddrive. Quite scary … but a problem which can be fixed easily

As always: no guarantee and on your own risk … especially the Terminal is a wonderful tool … but if you do the wrong thing, you may be in serious trouble!

You normally do not recognize the .htaccess file within the Finder: all filenames starting with a dot are hidden files in a UNIX system … and the Finder does not show those hidden files. But if you use the Terminal, you can look at all the hidden files easily.
So fire up the Terminal app and go to the root directory of your hard drive:

cd /

then looks at all the files in your root directory:

ls -la

If you find a .htaccess there … you probably found your problem. But look inside the file before your rename or delete it:

cat .htaccess

The easiest way to proceed is to rename the htaccess file:

mv .htaccess htaccess-backup

This way the file is shown in the Finder again and does not confuse your MAMP installation. If you know what to do you can delete the renamed file now within the Finder and drag it to the trash

• Those more than 800 million mobile devices have different screen sizes, different buttons or keyboards and some even have a touch screen. That does not help developers to create stunning GUIs on mobiles where every little pixel needs to be arranged.
• Flash is very performance hungry. That’s why they had to shrink it down to Flash Light – but even flash light is struggling with performance issues on many of the 800 million devices.
• Adobe does not provide a application store infrastructure for its developers … maybe one of the biggest issues of all

But on March 6, 2008 an other threat to Flash and Flash Light appeared: Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone SDK which provided a easy way to create third party applications for the iPhone with high mobile performance and the ability to take advantage of most of the sensors – like touchsceen, accelerometer, microphone, camera. And Apple solved one of the biggest hurdles for mobile application developers: They provided an easy application store solution for the developers to sell their apps or distribute them for free. And also the market for these native iPhone applications is quite attractive: There are more than 50 million iPhones and iPod touch devices out there – all of them having the exact same screen size, all of them having a touch sceen, all of them having an accelerometer. Apple attracted a lot of independent developers as well the big names in game industry with their mobile application ecosystem.
Bringing Flash support to the iPhone Safari web browser was blocked by Apple because of those big performance issues. Apple also did not license Flash Light for the iPhone – quite logic because they built up their own developer base and their own mobile app ecosystem.
The only chance Adobe had was to built up an “injection”-strategy and develop their Flash authoring tool into an Objective-C & Cocoa code generator which allows Flash developers to create native iPhone applications by the press of a button. Then the Flash developers can upload their app to the iTunes AppStore and use it as a selling and distribution channel.
This probably wasn’t an easy job and it will be quite interesting to watch Apple’s reaction on this move. It probably will have a massive effect on the AppStore as this will flood the store with new apps: More creativity and more junk.

Louis Gerbarge spotted the technical issues of the Adobe Flash to native iPhone code generation – and takes a look on the performance and private API issues of the beta version of the CS5 solution. His post makes clear that taking the Flash way won’t offer the Flash developers the features and beauty of the uncountable iPhone SDK 3.x APIs.

Problem: After updating from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard the installed printer driver for the OKI-postscript driver does not work anymore. Here it’s an OKI MFP C5540 … but it should also work with other models, like the OKI C5450 or C8800. The printer diver was installed under Leopard and worked quite well. After finishing the update to 10.6 you are able to send a print job to the printer, but an error message shows up in the print queue.

Diagnosis: Two bugs may cause the problem: Some of the OKI-printer drivers just disregard case sensitivity in their path names – this wasn’t a problem in former Mac OS X versions – but it is a problem in Snow Leopard. The other bug – which even leads to a malfunction if the path names are right – is some wrong file permissions. And this causes Snow Leopard to hiccup when you try to print on an OKI-Printer.

Solution: The easiest way to solve the problems and get rid of the bugs is following three major steps:

1. Delete the old OKI printer drivers under the folder “/Library/Printers/” … if there are any.
2. Install a new OKI driver. This will also create the folder “/Library/Printers/OKIDATA”. Then install the specific printer driver for your OKI-printer (especially the PPD file).
3. Repair the file permissions.

You only need the OKI printer drivers and you have to put in some Terminal commands. But let’s do it step by step:

• Log into your Mac as an administrator.
• Step 1: Delete the old OKI files and folders:
• Don’t forget to backup your data before you start!
• Navigate to the following folder in the Finder and delete the folder “OKIDATA” or “Okidata” – if there is any.

  Macintosh HD/Library/Printers/

• Within the folder “PPDs” you may find also some OKI files – at my Mac it was “Oki C5540.ppd” – delete also these files.
• Step 2: Re-installation of the OKI printer driver. The installation program of older printer drivers may cause problems when creating the “OKIDATA” folder: They may name this folder “Okidata” and put in an old OKfilterA-file.
• Therefore you should download and install the printer driver for C5550n-MFP of OKI-USA specifically for Leopard users first. Just click on the “Mac OS X.5″ link on the printer driver page of OKIDATA-USA, download the installer.
• Then start the installer and put in your password. The installation program will create the folder “OKIDATA” as needed.
• If the C5550n MFP is not the OKI printer you have, you have to download install also the specific printer driver for your OKI-printer model. I had to choose the C5540n MFP. The installation will not overwrite the folder OKIDATA and only put’s the missing PPDs into the right folders.
• Step 3: Repair folder & file permissions. Open the program “Terminal” – you’ll find it under “Programs/Utilities”.
• Input the following command into the appearing command-line window and finish it with pressing the return-key:

  sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/Printers/OKIDATA

• Now, you’ll be prompted for your password … so put in your password of the admin account and finish the input by pressing the return key again
• Input a second command into the command-line window and finish it with pressing the return-key:

  sudo chmod 775 /Library/Printers/OKIDATA/Filters/OKfilterA

• A little complicated – but it works. Just exit the Terminal program and restart your Mac. Then you can setup your OKI-printer and select the specific OKI-printer driver manually.

Video-on-demand Quicktime-Stream of the Apple Special Event September 2009

Here are the facts of the 75min event:

Sales figures:

• Apple sold 30 million iPhones over the last 2 years
• In total they sold 220 million iPods since now. 20 million of these are iPod touch and 100 million are iPod Nano devices
• This means of over 50 million customers have access to the AppStore and can buy apps.
• 1.8 billion AppStore app-downloads (without updates)
• iTunes is #1 music retailer in the world
• iTunes has more than 100 million accounts

iTunes & iPhone OS update:

• iTunes 9 and iPhone OS update 3.1
• Genius-recommendations for apps in the AppStore
• 30.000 ringtones
• Genius Mixes … automatic mixes of songs in your library
• Improved synchronization
• Management of the iPhone / iPod touch apps within iTunes
• Home Sharing of songs
• Improved interface and optimized navigation within iTunes
• iTunes LP for music albums – the interactive replacement for LP-booklets
• iTunes Extras for Movies – Extras and chapter-selection for movies
• iTunes wish list

Sneak previews of new games:

• Ubisoft – Ben Mattens: Assasins Creed II Discovery
• Tapulous – Bart Decrem: Riddim Ribbon
• Gameloft – Mark Hickey: Nova
• EA Electronic Arts – Travis Boatman: Madden NFL 10

Update of the iPod product line:

• iPod touch – new price tags for iPod touch: $199 8GB – $299 – 32GB – $399 64GB. The two bigger models also have a faster processor and are up to 50% faster and they also support OpenGL ES 2.0 – like the iPhone 3GS.
• iPod classic – now comes with 160GB at the same price
• iPod shuffle – new colors and better prices as well as a new polished stainless steel special edition.
• iPod Nano – comes with a video camera, an fm-radio, audio recording, a pedometer and in many different colors.

Problem: After updating from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard the installed printer driver for the Kyocera-postscript driver does not work anymore. Here it’s an Kyocera Mita FS-2000D … but it should also work with other models. The printer diver was installed under Leopard and worked quite well. After finishing the update to 10.6 you are able to send a print job to the printer, but an error message shows up in the print queue.

Diagnosis:There are incorrect file permissions under Snow Leopard fort he Kyocera printer driver … and this causes some trouble. BTW a warm thank you to @kappuchino for his diagnosis and solution!

Solution:There is nothing like fixing the bug yourself You can easily fix the problem by one command in the Terminal:

1. Log into your Mac as an administrator.
2. Open the program “Terminal” – you’ll find it under “Programs/Utilities”.
3. Input the following command into the appearing command-line window and finish it with pressing the return-key:

   sudo chown root:wheel /usr/libexec/cups/filter/kyofilter

4. Now, you’ll be prompted for your password … so put in your password of the admin account and finish the input by pressing the return key again
5. That’s it. Just Close the Terminal program. Now printing on the Kyocera printer should be work like a charm.