Building digital stuff

The succes and struggles of digital product development. I am trying to collect solutions and case studies of my daily work as interaction design student and software developer. Leave me a comment if you find something useful. Portfolio  Twitter

[daveslr]

Slow Finder/File Picker after MacOS update

So I recently updated MacOS (the one that added the new Photos app) and afterwards my Finder was terribly slow to open folders. Also when I used the file picker, in Chrome for example, it took forever to go from one folder to another.

Fortunately I found a fix on the blog of #HASHBANG Productions. The problem is most likely a damaged database of CloudKit. If you remove it, it will be redownloaded and everything works again.

Just use this command in the terminal:

 rm ~/Library/Caches/CloudKit/CloudKitMetadata*

Here is the full blog post. There are also comments under the post that found that the problems had to do with linked cache folders that are on a different hard drive.

[daveslr]

Play/Pause Spotify with Mac play button without opening iTunes

Spotify on Mac can be controlled with the media buttons on the Mac keyboard. This is quite convenient. The only annoying thing is that sometimes iTunes will be started when Spotify is in the background while pressing play.

This can be fixed with a script. The script and instructions were found on superuser.com:  http://superuser.com/a/165341 It is easy to execute. Just extract, double-click to run and confirm twice. It worked for me without any problems on Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

The script is open source and can also be found here on GitHub.

[daveslr]

MediaElement fails to open sound file

Today I had the problem that I couldn't play a sound file in a Windows Phone app using MediaElement. When I looked at the object while debugging most of the properties had an InvocationException and then I figured out that the MediaFailed event was fired.

It turns out that MediaElement, for whatever reason, needs the ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT capability which I had revoked because I thought it is unnecessary. You can re-enable it in your projects Properties/WMAppManifest.xml in the capabilities tab.

[daveslr]

Boot Camp Assistant stuck on copying files

If you want to install Windows on your Mac you might need to prepare a USB drive with the installation files using the Boot Camp Assistant. At one point the assistant starts copying files and seems to be stuck at one point. It takes a long time from there so be patient.

If you are not sure if there is still something going on check the files on your USB drive in Finder. Go to the "sources" folder and find the install.wim file. Check the size and wait a few minutes. If the size changes you can be sure that the copying is still in progress.

Props to Aesthetickz in the macrumors.com forum for pointing that out here.

[daveslr]

Starting a simple PHP web server on Mac

I just found out that PHP has a built-in web server that you can start from the command-line.

The command is

php -S 127.0.0.1:5000 -t <website_folder_path>

My PHP version is 5.4.17. Seems like this was introduced in PHP 5.4.

This is perfect if you need to test some PHP site quickly without having to install Apache and so on. I used it to test the PHP mailer script I use for the form on my portfolio. 

Props to Gordon on StackOverflow and this thread.

[daveslr]

Object has no method 'S3Uploader'

I am working on a rails project for a university course and we are using Heroku to host it. So for uploading files we need to find another solution like Amazon S3.

I include the gem s3_direct_upload into the project to upload directly to S3 and then post the URL to the rails application on Heroku. It didn't do anything when I selected a file in the generated form though.

When checking the console on Chrome Developer Tools I saw the Javascript error "Object [object Object] has no method 'S3Uploader'". The problem was that I am also using pusher as a service for WebSocket communication and their tutorial told me to include jQuery in my application.html.erb.

However jQuery was already included in application.js and s3_direct_upload adds a new method to it. By including jQuery a second time after s3_direct_upload.js, this method is lost. So watch out if you include jQuery again after the s3_direct_upload.js.

[daveslr]

Getting 404 errors for assets on Heroku

So after working through chapter 5 of the Rails tutorial (http://railstutorial.org) I pushed my app to Heroku. It worked but I looked at plain HTML page without any styling. The CSS, JavaScript and images could not be loaded.

The problem is that this is the default behavior of Rails 4 for production because most of the time there will be a proxy server like Nginx that handles the static assets delivery. However Heroku doesn't do this.

A solution is to include the following gem in the production area of your Gemfile:

gem 'rails_serve_static_assets'

Read more about the issue in Heroku's dev center page.

[daveslr]

Rspec und Capybara problems with the Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial

So I am working thorugh Michael Hartl's video tutorial on Ruby on Rails (http://railstutorial.org). The tutorial is a bit older using Rails 3.2 and Ruby 1.9 (I believe) and some older gems.

I am working with the current versions of Rails 4.0 and ruby 2.0. So I came to the point where he is testing the titles of some pages with Rspec and it would not work. I searched a long time for reasons these test are failing.

Turns out Capybara doesn't test for object that are not visible on the page anymore. And a link further it tells me about some workarounds and that the new Capybara has a method for testing page titles. So update to Capybara 2.1.0 (from 1.1.2)...

Apparently in Capybara 2.x some things have changed and the "visit" method in the test is suddenly undefined.

Solution is to move the static_pages_spec.rb from spec/requests folder to spec/features and include the following line of code in spec_helper.rb:

#insert after "RSpec.configure do |config|" config.include Capybara::DSL, :type => :feature

and rewrite the title test like this

page.should have_title 'About us'

I hope this helps somebody safe some time.

[daveslr]

Colors in iTerm2

Include the following in you .bash_profile

# Set CLICOLOR if you want Ansi Colors in iTerm2 export CLICOLOR=1 # Set colors to match iTerm2 Terminal Colors export TERM=xterm-256color

Then restart you terminal app or input source ~/.bash_profile

Props to sam3k and this superuser thread.

[daveslr]

AmbiguousMatchException on SampleData in Blend

While working on .NET applications with Blend and Visual Studio I like to create some sample data to see what the design looks like with content in it.

I just had the problem that Blend and Visual Studio told me that an ambiguous match was found in my sample data.

Problem was that I created a SampleClass that derives from my ViewModel so I can use a simple List instead of the specialized Collection class that I used in the real ViewModel. So I just overwrote the collection property with the "new" keyword. The reflection code of Visual Studio/Blend then didn't know which property to fill with the data.

Solution was to not derive the sample class but copy all properties from the ViewModel and change the types if necessary.