Quick check out Qwickr
If you're a Java developer you ought to check out
Qwickr at your earliest
convenience.
It's a JPA (Java Persistence Architecture) tool for JEE5 applications. It's a pretty neat piece of software engineering that essentially gives you direct access to your underlying entity model using little more than a web browser.
Why is this good? Well, for a start you can construct and drill down into queries against your entity model in JPQL (which to developers may be simpler than SQL), it also extends JPQL and allows for INSERT statements. This means that you have effectively complete access to your underlying data as your applications see it. So, no more flushing caches when you need to simply change a record.
I can think of a whole bunch of times that this would have saved my life when working on a recent EJB3 project.
It's a JPA (Java Persistence Architecture) tool for JEE5 applications. It's a pretty neat piece of software engineering that essentially gives you direct access to your underlying entity model using little more than a web browser.
Why is this good? Well, for a start you can construct and drill down into queries against your entity model in JPQL (which to developers may be simpler than SQL), it also extends JPQL and allows for INSERT statements. This means that you have effectively complete access to your underlying data as your applications see it. So, no more flushing caches when you need to simply change a record.
I can think of a whole bunch of times that this would have saved my life when working on a recent EJB3 project.
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er, point 1?
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Launching Relaunch 1.2
I'm happy to announce that another updated version of
Relaunch is now available.
This version adds to Relaunch the ability for it to remember not only which applications you had open but also which documents you had open in them. Currently it supports 20 commonly used mac apps including Microsoft's Office, Apple's iWork suite, Omni Outliner, Omni Graffle, GarageBand, Subethaedit and VoodoPad.
For more information see the Relaunch product page.
This version adds to Relaunch the ability for it to remember not only which applications you had open but also which documents you had open in them. Currently it supports 20 commonly used mac apps including Microsoft's Office, Apple's iWork suite, Omni Outliner, Omni Graffle, GarageBand, Subethaedit and VoodoPad.
For more information see the Relaunch product page.
Relaunch v1.1
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It's been a couple of days since launching Relaunch
and it's had lots of downloads and a review on
Softpedia which stated that it was good, but needed
more features.
So, we added a new feature - 'auto snapshot' - this effectively means you can run Relaunch and never have to interact with it.
At all times it knows what applications you have open and should the worst happen, or you need to reboot, it will start them all back up again for you.
There's more coming too, so keep your eyes on our site.
Relaunch 1.1
So, we added a new feature - 'auto snapshot' - this effectively means you can run Relaunch and never have to interact with it.
At all times it knows what applications you have open and should the worst happen, or you need to reboot, it will start them all back up again for you.
There's more coming too, so keep your eyes on our site.
Relaunch 1.1
Introducing Relaunch
Relaunch is a small utility I've been hacking away on
for a little while now and have decided to release to
the world at large. It was borne out of my
frustration with Software Update (and certain other
installs) increasingly requiring me to restart the
machine Windows style.
Relaunch runs as a Menu Item in OSX and on request takes a list of currently running applications which it then restarts when you next login or restart the machine. For those of you who never reboot you can also launch the applications manually. You get five free goes (or reboots, if you like) before it asks you to register (which only costs $5). It's a simple little app and I hope you like it.
Relaunch Product Page
Relaunch runs as a Menu Item in OSX and on request takes a list of currently running applications which it then restarts when you next login or restart the machine. For those of you who never reboot you can also launch the applications manually. You get five free goes (or reboots, if you like) before it asks you to register (which only costs $5). It's a simple little app and I hope you like it.
Relaunch Product Page
What's with the new site?
Well, for those of you that didn't go to CocoaDevHouse London you missed
out on some excellent gifts from the main
sponsor RealMac Software.
One of which was a copy of RapidWeaver, their flagship product. I'd been looking for an alternative to iWeb for a while now as I've been having all kinds of problems trying to set up the funky stuff such as Google Ads. I know that you can use the likes of iWebEnhancer and I did, a couple of times, but it wasn't really what I was looking for.
I had looked at RapidWeaver, but never really figured out if it would do what I wanted it to do. Fortunately (for me) Nik Fletcher did an excellent short presentation on how to use it and answered all of my questions. The long and short of it is that you have a lot more control in RapidWeaver than you do in iWeb and it's an ace little product that is manufactured in the UK.
One of which was a copy of RapidWeaver, their flagship product. I'd been looking for an alternative to iWeb for a while now as I've been having all kinds of problems trying to set up the funky stuff such as Google Ads. I know that you can use the likes of iWebEnhancer and I did, a couple of times, but it wasn't really what I was looking for.
I had looked at RapidWeaver, but never really figured out if it would do what I wanted it to do. Fortunately (for me) Nik Fletcher did an excellent short presentation on how to use it and answered all of my questions. The long and short of it is that you have a lot more control in RapidWeaver than you do in iWeb and it's an ace little product that is manufactured in the UK.
Packaging OSX Applications Part 2
So, some smart-arse emailed me (Hi, Ron), with a
suggested improvement to the script I published
yesterday, and you know, he’s right...
His suggestion was to use a compressed .dmg as opposed to zipping the image as it creates less clutter for your users when they come to use it. He sent a patch, so here’s the updated package.sh
(Note - you can use the new -b option when finalising the image to create a bzipped image, without it you get a zlib zipped image)
The next thing I wanted to get onto was how you can set the background image of your .dmg, like everyone seems to do these days. Well, here is the easiest way I know.
1. Create your temporary DMG, open it and in it create a normal folder called hidden
2. Copy a suitable image into the ‘hidden’ folder
3. Show the View Options inspector (option-j) and select ‘This window only’ and change the background picture to the one in your ‘hidden’ folder.
4. Open the Terminal.app and navigate to your mounted drive (i.e. cd /Volumes/MyApp-temp )
5. Rename the ‘hidden’ folder to ‘.hidden’ (i.e. mv hidden .hidden )
Unmount and finalise your dmg and go to the pub..
His suggestion was to use a compressed .dmg as opposed to zipping the image as it creates less clutter for your users when they come to use it. He sent a patch, so here’s the updated package.sh
(Note - you can use the new -b option when finalising the image to create a bzipped image, without it you get a zlib zipped image)
The next thing I wanted to get onto was how you can set the background image of your .dmg, like everyone seems to do these days. Well, here is the easiest way I know.
1. Create your temporary DMG, open it and in it create a normal folder called hidden
2. Copy a suitable image into the ‘hidden’ folder
3. Show the View Options inspector (option-j) and select ‘This window only’ and change the background picture to the one in your ‘hidden’ folder.
4. Open the Terminal.app and navigate to your mounted drive (i.e. cd /Volumes/MyApp-temp )
5. Rename the ‘hidden’ folder to ‘.hidden’ (i.e. mv hidden .hidden )
Unmount and finalise your dmg and go to the pub..
Packaging OSX Applications Part 1
Something new is coming soon from Wired Up and Fired
Up Ltd and I’ve been looking at packaging recently.
There are two popular options for packaging an OS X application namely, a zipped package (.pkg) file or the zipped drive image (.dmg) and choosing one is really down to the type of application you are planning to unleash.
Ninjar, for example, uses a packaged install. This is because it’s a Spotlight plugin and needs installing somewhere off the beaten track that you probably don’t want to explain to most users. It also kicks off a spotlight re-index of the disk on install, again something that a managed install can do neatly without bothering anyone.
Most simple applications however, are better served by distributing them as a zipped drive image. You know the routine - image mounts, drag the new app to the /Applications folder and trash the image. Sorted!
So how do you go about creating the .dmg and putting your app into it? And how about getting a funky background image in there as well, like they do in that fancy Adium?
Well, I’ve put together a packaging script that simplifies this process to:
1. Run script to create a temporary .dmg of a specified size and name
2. Mount the .dmg and copy your application (and any supporting files) into it
3. Unmount the application
4. Run the script again to finalize the .dmg and zip it up ready to distribute
So, how does this work?
Firstly download package.sh
1. Copy it to somewhere into your home folder (easiest as you have full permissions there).
2. Launch Terminal.app from /Applications/Utilities
3. Change directory (‘cd’) to wherever you copied the packaging script and give it execute permissions i.e.
chmod +x package.sh
4. Run the script to create a temporary .dmg of a specified size, e.g.
./package.sh -a AppName -m 2
5. This will have created an image called AppName-temp.dmg roughly 2Mb in size.
6. In the Finder, navigate to the AppName-temp.dmg and mount it by opening it, it should mount on your desktop with the name ‘AppName’
7. Drag your application (and anything else) into the AppName drive on your desktop. When you are finished eject the drive by dragging it into the trash.
8. Back in Terminal.app run the script again to finalize and zip your image, e.g.
./package.sh -a AppName -f
Er, that’s it! You should now have an AppName.dmg.zip to distribute.
I’ve been using this script to help bundle up the beta versions of ‘the new thing’ and it seems to be working well. Feel free to distribute the script, add to it or mail me with suggestions. It is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
As for the funky background image, I’ll cover that in a later post....
There are two popular options for packaging an OS X application namely, a zipped package (.pkg) file or the zipped drive image (.dmg) and choosing one is really down to the type of application you are planning to unleash.
Ninjar, for example, uses a packaged install. This is because it’s a Spotlight plugin and needs installing somewhere off the beaten track that you probably don’t want to explain to most users. It also kicks off a spotlight re-index of the disk on install, again something that a managed install can do neatly without bothering anyone.
Most simple applications however, are better served by distributing them as a zipped drive image. You know the routine - image mounts, drag the new app to the /Applications folder and trash the image. Sorted!
So how do you go about creating the .dmg and putting your app into it? And how about getting a funky background image in there as well, like they do in that fancy Adium?
Well, I’ve put together a packaging script that simplifies this process to:
1. Run script to create a temporary .dmg of a specified size and name
2. Mount the .dmg and copy your application (and any supporting files) into it
3. Unmount the application
4. Run the script again to finalize the .dmg and zip it up ready to distribute
So, how does this work?
Firstly download package.sh
1. Copy it to somewhere into your home folder (easiest as you have full permissions there).
2. Launch Terminal.app from /Applications/Utilities
3. Change directory (‘cd’) to wherever you copied the packaging script and give it execute permissions i.e.
chmod +x package.sh
4. Run the script to create a temporary .dmg of a specified size, e.g.
./package.sh -a AppName -m 2
5. This will have created an image called AppName-temp.dmg roughly 2Mb in size.
6. In the Finder, navigate to the AppName-temp.dmg and mount it by opening it, it should mount on your desktop with the name ‘AppName’
7. Drag your application (and anything else) into the AppName drive on your desktop. When you are finished eject the drive by dragging it into the trash.
8. Back in Terminal.app run the script again to finalize and zip your image, e.g.
./package.sh -a AppName -f
Er, that’s it! You should now have an AppName.dmg.zip to distribute.
I’ve been using this script to help bundle up the beta versions of ‘the new thing’ and it seems to be working well. Feel free to distribute the script, add to it or mail me with suggestions. It is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
As for the funky background image, I’ll cover that in a later post....