On My Leopard Installation So Far …

Well, today I pulled the trigger: I received OS X Leopard (10.5) in the mail and decided to install it. I had most of the night free, so I figured it would be a good time to attempt an upgrade and see what might take place.

Except for a couple of problems (only one Leopard related), things seem to be going pretty well.

I’ll be posting more on this in the next few days, including application compatibility issues (or, hopefully, lack thereof), system performance, etc. For now, while things don’t appear as “zippy” as they did in Tiger, they haven’t been bad by any means.

I did have a problem, after the new Keychain 10.5 update, with my Airport card suddenly disappearing. I went ahead and dragged an ethernet cable over to the Mac and immediately found the culprit (if you’re interested, check this out: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5661752#5661752.

Also, I experienced my first real need to use my RAID array as, somewhere between my upgrade and now, my media drive decided to fail. I’m not sure if it is the drive itself (doesn’t seem to be) or simply data corruption. I am in the process of restoring it now (from backup).

Here’s hoping things continue to go well …

On iMovie ‘08

I bought iLife ‘08 the weekend Apple announced its release. While most of the suite was a bit of let-down for me, some events happened this week that have changed my mind about the new version of iMovie.

iMovie ‘08 was practically re-written from scratch from iMovie ‘06, and there are a few people (including me) that believe this was a mistake. I don’t like iMovie ‘08, and I found myself firing up ‘06 after only a half-an-hour or so doing some video importing and editing. My background is in timeline based editing (such as Sony Vegas, Adobe Premier, and Final Cut) and the removal of the timeline as we knew it was one of the big controversial design changes in this new version.

This week, Amber asked for some help in creating a slide-show for a friend of ours that is celebrating a 10 year remission of cancer. I initially opened iMove ‘06 but some sort of video filter was in place that was causing the pictures I initially placed on the timeline as an example to look, well, weird. I didn’t have time to figure out what the problem is, so I just opened iMovie ‘08, demonstrated to her the basic idea of making a slideshow, and let her go to town building something.

She was up until 4:30am, with work at 7:30, working in iMovie.

The next day, I asked her about her experience in the software. Suffice it to say, she loved it. On top of that, the movie she made was really, really good … much better than she (or I) probably could have done in practically anything else in that amount of time. In fact, she is so good at it that I asked her to consider making these sorts of things on a regular basis to take the place of Christmas cards, presents, etc.

I realized this week that Apple’s goal in redesigning iMovie was for her, not me. She doesn’t need fancy timeline editing, advanced special effects, a robust plugin architecture, etc … she just needs an easy way to get photos, music, and titles on the screen and have it look good. And that’s exactly what she did with practically no problem at all in iMovie ‘08. Additionally, her experience unlocked her creativity in that arena, and proved to her (and, frankly, to me) that she can do this sort of thing well. There is almost no way that could have happened for her in a complicated editing environment like Final Cut, but this experience might eventually move her into something with more umph behind it if and when she needs it.

So, I take back the bad things I’ve said (and thought) about iMovie!

Amber’s iMovie ‘08 Photo Project

On Making Google Maps Work in IE 7

I recently spent some time last week integrating google maps into an online booking application that we are building for a client. It was my first time dealing with the Google API, and I am extremely impressed with the ease and relative cleanliness of the interface!

My main machine is a Mac, and the bulk of the programming I do is in Windows for various reasons. In order to facilitate this, I use Parallels as my Windows VM. However, for web development, there is almost no reason to be in Windows (which is one reason I enjoy it so much). I simply fire up Coda and I’m off!

Enter IE.

Yuck.

Over the weekend, I finished a test version of the site and fired off an e-mail to my boss and our client, telling them that the work was ready for review. On Monday morning, I got word that the site wasn’t working. I opened up Safari and Firefox and everything seemed to work fine. That’s when I realized I forgot to test the site in IE.

Sure enough, when I tried the site, I got the following error message:

Google Maps IE error: “A Runtime Error has occurred. Line:37.”

Of course, I did not get this error in IE until I enabled script debugging in the Internet Options->Advanced tab.

After doing some snooping around the Google Maps Group, I discovered that IE7, for whatever reason, did not like the version of the API. So, I changed this:

script src=”http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2&amp

to this:

script src=”http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2.50a&amp

And the error magically went away.

One problem solved. According to Google’s documentation, the “v=2″ is supposed to default to the latest version of the API. However, for whatever reason, that latest version doesn’t seem to work properly with IE (works fine with Firefox and Safari, though).

One problem down.

The next problem I had was the appearance of the map in general. Instead of looking like this:

The correct map view.

It was coming out like this:

The IE7 map view.

What I discovered was that the div container ID I was using for the map (simply “map”) was also the anchor link name I was using. Apparently, while Firefox and Safari can tell the difference between a link name and a div name, IE can’t. IE was, as far as I could tell, trying to fit the map into an anchor since the anchor came first (not sure I get the logic on that one).

All I had to do was change the anchor name and everything began to work as advertised.