While trying to order some prints from Kodak/Apple via iPhoto yesterday, I repeatedly got the pseudo-error message:

“Please review your billing information and approve it.”

After checking out my billing information twice, and still getting that error, I found the answer on an Apple Discussions thread: Make sure your credit card verification code is entered in the Account Information screen. Why iPhoto doesn’t highlight or complain about the missing required field is beyond me, but overlooking this tiny field causes problems that hardly indicate their source.

I don’t use the Dashboard in Mac OS X as much as I expected to when it was first released, but when I do, one of the few widgets I employ is Delivery Status, which keeps track of packages during shipment. Big, bold numbers display the days until delivery, and smaller text reports on various stops throughout the package’s voyage. With support for over 30 carriers, including all of the most common here in the U.S., Delivery Status conveys what you need to know at a glance, making it an ideal Dashboard widget. Also in the works is an iPhone/iPod Touch application serving the same purpose with an interface optimized for touchscreen devices.

In my endless configuration with my computer set-up, I ran into my second major issue with Boot Camp, and managed to find a working solution worth documenting. Starting with a single Mac OS X Leopard volume, Boot Camp Assistant kept failing and reporting “not enough space left on device” while attempting to live-partition my hard drive into two partitions for OS X and Windows (newer versions of Mac OS X can partition hard drives while booted, without any formatting). However, I had over 50% of the drive’s capacity free, so there should have been lots of space left on the drive. Clearly something was amiss…

Having started out with computers as a relatively old school Mac user — one who had to backup and erase a hard drive to partition it — I was immediately suspicious of the new-ish live-partition tool. To work around that, I tried booting the Leopard DVD and running Disk Utility from the Utilities menu, then partitioning the drive using that method. Again, I was met failure, but with an ambiguous “partition error” on which Disk Utility did not elaborate. The “Verify Disk” command reported that my volume was in good shape, despite my suspicions of corruption. DiskWarrior 4 also confirmed that the volume’s directory structure was intact. With 90+ GB free on my MacBook Pro’s 160 GB disk, how could I have “not enough space” to simply slice off a 20 GB Windows partition for run-of-the-mill use?

Out of quick-fix ideas, I decided to back up my Mac OS X volume, erase the drive, partition it, restore my OS X image to the big partition, then install Windows to the new smaller partition. Without a network-ready imaging utility like Ghost or TrueImage for Mac OS X (are there any?), I had to do this a slightly more complicated way:

1. Boot Mac OS X and connect to a network share on another computer (a networked PC, in my case).
2. Run SuperDuper! and back up the entire contents of the drive to the other computer.
3. When done, boot the Leopard DVD and run Disk Utility again, and erase and partition the drive into one HFS+ Journaling partition for Mac OS X and one FAT32 partition for Windows.
4. Boot a Windows CD, and “quick format” the FAT32 partition to NTFS (since Disk Utility can’t natively create an NTFS volume), then install Windows.
5. Install Boot Camp drivers from the Leopard DVD: The Windows volume on the Leopard DVD contains the necessary Boot Camp drivers. Nice touch, Apple!
6. Boot from the Leopard DVD again, but run Terminal this time — there’s no point-and-click way to connect to a network share from the DVD…
7. Typically, you’d do mount_smbfs to connect to a Windows share, but it failed with “mount_smbfs: failed to load the smb library: Unknown error: 1102″ (No luck with mount -t smbfs, either). mount_afp appears to work, though.
8. With no way to use SMB to get at the imaged Mac OS X volume made earlier, I downloaded a trial version of Extreme-Z IP, which provides AFP file and printer sharing support for Windows. After skipping prompts about Printer Sharing and automatically importing my SMB/Windows shares, it worked beautifully.
9. Back at the Terminal on the MacBook, mkdir /Volumes/Sharename; mount_afp afp://username:password@192.168.1.10/Sharename /Volumes/Sharename mounted Sharename from the PC onto /Volumes/Sharename on the Mac over Ethernet. (The hidden /Volumes/ folder is where all connected Mac volumes show up).
10. Back under Disk Utility, I was almost able to Restore the disk image to the proper volume over the network as if it were a local volume, but… it was grayed out in the file picker dialog.
11. The “Scan Image for Restore” button resulted in a failed process, but it DID add the disk image to the sidebar of Disk Utility, which enabled drag-and-drop such that I could restore it to the HFS+J volume.

After a few hours of restoring data, my MacBook Pro is back, with Mac OS X on one volume just as I left it right before the imaging, and a fresh Windows install on the other. Surely Apple never meant for Boot Camp to be this complicated, but they underestimated the extent of my tinkering and day-to-day use! I hope my documentation can help someone in a similar situation…

Resources

• Apple Support Discussions – Full restore from a remote disk
• AFP Third Party implementations

SmartSleep is one of those “I wish I knew about this earlier” pieces of software that saves me several minutes every day when I put my MacBook Pro to sleep. Intel Mac laptops (and some of the late G4 laptops) have three sleep states: basic sleep, sleep and hibernate, and full-on hibernate. Sleep is the basic low-power mode, and hibernate actually writes the contents of RAM to disk to conserve even more battery power and prevent the contents of RAM from being lost in the event of a power outage. By default, Intel Macs do the latter, and spend 20 to 60 seconds dumping RAM to disk before going to sleep, depending on how much RAM you have installed. If you happen to run your Mac on AC power most of the time, waiting for the disk to spin down can feel like minutes, but SmartSleep lets you safely switch between sleep modes. After setting my MacBook Pro to sleep only, it blinks off and spins down in only a second or two — a huge improvement in sleep time. This “feature” has been bugging me for the last several months, and SmartSleep quickly and effectively adds the system preference that Apple forgot.

One Window

Two weeks ago I finally decided to give Panic’s newest Mac OS X offering, Coda, a thorough test to see if will better serve my web development needs. I had known about it since its initial release, hailed by many as the perfect solution to web developers needs, while downplayed by some due to lack of features. Coda is an 80% solution — an application that tries to simplify the average coder’s workflow, unifying the standard multi-program arrangement into one window, with configurable tabs for various purposes. Panic won’t win everyone over with this tactic, but the idea of opening a single, dedicated program to do my work in really appealed to me both as a designer and a programmer. Coda’s icon, a simple green leaf, subtly hints “keep it simple” at every launch. Panic’s developers have taken this approach to heart, crafting a straightforward interface which rivals that of the best Mac applications.

One week ago, I purchased Coda. It doesn’t have Subversion support and it doesn’t have fullscreen mode. What I did find, though, is a unique application that neatly organizes most of the tools I need to get web development done. A syntax-completing text editor, visual or textual CSS editor, terminal, and live web preview are among my most used tools, any of which can be swapped for another, or split into multiple views. With my preferred syntax coloring set up, Coda’s split tabs make me feel right at home, editing HTML and CSS side by side with a preview of the results just a click away.

Get Back to Work

Coda makes getting back into “the zone” really quite easy with its Sites feature, which keeps track of each project’s tab arrangement, FTP settings, public URL, and more. Double-click a Site to start working right where you left off. As for publishing, Coda leverages Transmit’s FTP engine, which keeps folders in sync between your computer and web host with little effort.

A Few Shortcomings

I often work with MySQL as my data store and use CocoaMySQL as a front-end, but switching applications goes against the one-window flow that Coda tries so hard to bring together, so I installed phpMyAdmin and just use it inside a Preview tab within Coda — couldn’t be simpler. The same goes for online documentation not covered by the built-in PHP and JavaScript references. For Subversion, I’ll just use command-line ‘svn’ calls within a Terminal mode, as it’s surprisingly straightforward for a command-line utility.

Only the Beginning

As of this writing, Coda is just at version 1.1, so there’s plenty of room for it to grow. At the very least, I hope to see fullscreen mode similar to NetNewsWire’s in the near future, so I can really get into my code and ignore little distractions like menu bar extras, Mail badges, etc. Panic has dropped their biggest application yet on the Mac web developer community, and overall, I’m very satisfied with Coda and am getting so much more done in so fewer windows.