nick.recoil.org

My brother recently got a 20” iMac for his work in Cambridge, and asked me for a list of applications that might be of use to him. I thought I’d share this on my blog too:

• TextMate – Shareware text editor. Absolutely fantastic!
• Smultron – A less functional TextMate, for those on a budget
• VLC – An excellent all-round media player
• MPlayerOSX – Another good media player
• iTerm – Tabbed terminal application
• Darwin Ports – An excellent open source package building and management system
• Omnigraffle – Diagram drawing tool
• YourSQL – MySQL database GUI interface
• VoodooPad Lite – Local wiki tool, if you don’t like plain ol’ Stickies
• Quicksilver – Useful quick-launch utility
• TestXSLT – If you are working on any XSLT, it allows you to test scripts quickly and easily
• Native OSX apache PHP module – Useful, although I’m personally erring more towards Ruby these days
• VirtueDesktops – If you are used to virtual desktops
• Soap Client & XML-RPC Client – A couple of very nice, free applications for helping with Web Service development
• LDapper – For querying and developing LDAP databases
• Handbrake – DVD-to-MPEG4/h.264 ripping
• Breve.app – Simulation eye candy
• CSSEdit.app – CSS editing made easy
• Flame – Bonjour service sniffing
• NewsMac Pro – My RSS reader of choice
• Colloquy – Convenient IRC/SILC client

In trying to install rb-fxruby from Darwinports, I ran up against a problem with the linker when trying to build fxscintilla, which reported:

ld: flag: -undefined dynamic_lookup can't be used with
MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET environment variable set to: 10.1
/usr/bin/libtool: internal link edit command failed
make[1]: *** [libfxscintilla.la] Error 1
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

and it turns out the solution is to set up your shell environment to include MACOSX\DEPLOYMENT\TARGET set to 10.4, so for all you bash users,

export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET="10.4"

and then the build works like a charm. This is related to the concept of weak linking under Mac OS X, which allows code that was built and linked on 10.4 to still work on 10.3, providing the libraries export the same symbols. There is more in this Apple Tech Note.