Technical Communication & Information Design
The open source Web development environment formerly known as the Aptana IDE has been re-christened as “Aptana Studio” and released as Version 1.0.
As of v1.0, the Eclipse-based product has been split into two different “editions”. The Community Edition remains free, and a new Professional Edition has been introduced for commercial use with “priority” support and a few extra features such as FTPS and SFTP.
For details on the new release, see the Aptana blog.
A quick search for Mac CHM viewers yields a handful of open source & shareware apps which provide Mac users access to Windows help files in the Compiled HTML Help (CHM) format.
A few older shareware apps such as Chimp and CHM Viewer are only available in PowerPC versions and apparently no longer actively developed.
The remaining candidates are all free, open source software and available as universal binaries for PPC & Intel Macs. Each does pretty much the same thing–more or less successfully–though none of them quite manage to support all of the features CHMs provide in their native Windows environment.
Here’s a short list of a few pros (+) & cons (-) that appear at first glance:
Chmox
+ Beautiful HTML page rendering via Apple’s WebKit browser engine
- Chokes on some large & complex pages
- No search, index or favorites support
xCHM
+ Functional search, index & favorites (bookmarks)
- Only basic HTML rendering, poor table/CSS support
Chamonix
+ Supposedly supports ToC, Indexing, Search and Favorites,
- Unreliable–index shown in test file is incomplete, odd CSS background rendering quirks
(should we read “Chamonix” as “shame on it”?)
For a more detailed–though somewhat outdated–comparison of xCHM & the now-defunct CHM Viewer, see this Mac OS X Hints article.
When you compress a file or folder in the Finder via the Create Archive command, a ZIP file is created using the current date as modification date.
But when you’re archiving older data, it’s much more useful for the ZIP file date to reflect the date of its contents, since a few years from now you probably won’t care when you compressed the stuff, but rather how old the files inside are.
Fortunately, the command line version of ZIP included in Mac OS X includes an option to do just this: zip -o, which according to the man page will
Set the “last modified” time of the zip archive to the latest (oldest) “last modified” time found among the entries in the zip archive
—which is just what we want.
But depending on your command line proficiency, you may find it a bit tedious to open up a terminal window and look up the command syntax every time you need to compress a file.
Enter Automator, one of the most useful (and unsung) productivity tools in OS X, which we’ll use to create a new Finder plug-in (or “workflow”).
To create the workflow, open /Applications/Automator.app and add three actions in this order:
Drag the Create Archive Finder action to the workflow area, placing it after the first action.
(At this point, you can pre-specify a name and location for the archive file, or set the Options to prompt for this information when the workflow runs.)
/bin/bash, set Pass input to as arguments, and replace the default script in the text box with zip -o "$@".That’s it!—Save the workflow as a Finder Plug-in, and you can run it on files & folders in the Finder by Control-clicking and choosing your new command from the Automator submenu in the shortcut menu.
If you use the Enable Mac OS keyboard shortcuts option in VMware Fusion, Mac keyboard commands are passed on to the VM, which is useful if your Mac-schooled muscle memory has you pressing Apple+S every time you breathe.
The Enable Mac OS mouse shortcuts also affects the CTRL key, which is used in Windows for nonadjacent selection & a few other handy things.
With the latter option active, VMware interprets the a CTRL-click like a Mac would, invoking the context shortcut menu instead of extending the current selection, which can be absolutely vexing if you’re trying to select a bunch of individual files in a folder or open a Firefox link in a new tab.
While you can easily disable the option entirely, there is an alternative if you’ve grown accustomed to command-clicking to emulate a middle-click and want access to these mouse shortcuts in your VM:
To have it both ways, just use the Enter key to the right of the space bar instead! When you press this key and click the mouse, VMware passes this on to Windows as a CTRL-click.