It is not as complicated as you think. Given that Macs are descendants of *nix system, it already has apache2 and PHP module built in, we only need to activate those two and install mySQL. Here’s how.

Activating apache web server

Piece of cake, you only need to go to System Preferences and then to the Sharing prefpane.

System Preferences

Inside the Sharing prefpane check the web sharing on the left hand side. Simple as that and you’re done.

Check web sharing in the pref pane

You know where you have the folder Sites in your home folder? If you put anything there, it will be accessible via http://localhost/~yourusername/. Cute anot?

Activating the PHP module

You will need to type things into terminal this time. This is also a piece of cake, don’t be afraid, the Terminal is our friend :)
To run terminal you can spotlight it or go to Applications / Utilities using Finder.

Terminall app via Finder

Here’s what you have to do in Terminal.

1. First go to /etc/apache2/ directory by typing cd /etc/apache2/ <return>. If it returns an error check your input, see if you’ve typed it right.
   

   Opening the httpd.conf in terminal

2. Next on, let’s open the apache configuration file: httpd.conf as root. We do this by typing sudo nano httpd.conf. You will be prompted to enter your login password. Upon doing so, this screen will show. This is nano, Terminal’s text editor.
   

   Editing httpd.conf using nano on Terminal

3. Now we’re going to activate the PHP5 module. If you take a look at the terminal screen, you’ll see a list of commands. We’ll do a ^W aka Where Is to find the line that says php5. Press Ctrl+W, type in php5 <return>
4. Take a good look at the terminal screen, you will see this line:
   #LoadModule php5_module libexec/httpd/libphp5.so. You only have to delete the # sign:
   LoadModule php5_module libexec/httpd/libphp5.so
5. Done, now exit nano with ^X command. You will be prompted to save your changes. Type Y <return> to save and exit. Don’t change the file name in process btw ;)
   

   Save and exit with ^X

That’s it, we have ourselves an apache2 web server with PHP. You can check if the PHP module’s running with a simple phpinfo();

Installing mySQL

Another walk in the park. If you don’t already have it, you can download mySQL server here. You are looking for the mySQL server installer in package format, it’s the .dmg format you’re already familiar with. It’s a 60MB download, smaller than the 70+ MB XAMPP and 130+ MB MAMP ;)

Installing is simple, mount the .dmg and then install all the packages including the .prefpane. After installing all items you will be taken to the newly installed mySQL prefpane.

mySQL prefpane

Done, now mySQL’s up and running. You might want to install Navicat or phpMyAdmin for the mySQL front end. Now that you have everything working, you can already start developing.

Extra: VirtualHostX to shorten your working URL

I’m not a big fan of long URLs, my working host is http://localhost/~anima/ and my phpMyAdmin URL is http://localhost/~anima/phpmyadmin/. Those are long badass URLs and I hate them, so I looked for a workaround shortening them and that’s when VirtualHostX comes to the rescue.

VirtualHostX

This way I can shorten my http://localhost/~anima/ to http://anima/ and my http://localhost/~anima/phpmyadmin/ to http://mysql/

Free version of VirtualHostX allows you to create 3 host names, that should be enough: one for the main working URL, one for mySQL and you have an extra one. Different story if you want to assign each projects of yours with a different host name. You must get a license then :)

Tyler Hall (the developer of VirtualHostX) was very kind to give me a free license of this because I tweeted something about it :)

Gotta love Macs, they have the beauty and the brains inside :) Happy developing!

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<?php for ($i=1; $i < 10; $i++) { echo "<a href=\"something.php?id=$i\">No $i</a>"; }

Am I right am I right?

Looks complicated? Hell yeah. Truth is, there’s a much simpler way to achieve the same goal. I learned this trick from Wordpress’ Loop. Check this out.

Let’s take a look at this piece of code, in here we’re doing a For loop:

<ul>
<?php
for ($i=1; $i<10; $i++) {
    echo "<li><a href=\"?p=$i\">Go to page # $i</a></li>";
}
?>
</ul>

As simple as that looks, the echo command could be a little tricky because we often have to use double quote and single quote characters inside. Debugging can be a pain in the ass.

An approach I propose: the Wordpress way. Here’s how:

<ul>
<?php
for ($i=1; $i<10; $i++) { ?>
    <li><a href="?p=<?php echo $i;?>">Go to page # <?php echo $i;?> </a></li>
<?php }
?>
</ul>

This way we exclude the HTML tags from the PHP loop. Wow I can’t really describe that, if you do PHP you know what I mean. Now you can HTML not inside the echo command.

Wordpress is using this approach on templating and I find it very easy to use once you get used to it. So why don’t you give it a try and let us know what you think :)

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Here’s how we do it

If you go to your profile page, you will notice there’s a button called settings. Found it? I didn’t realize it was there until a couple of months back *headsmack*. Click on that button to expand it, you’ll find the settings you’re looking for.

Import feeds to Facebook profile

There you go, now you can show off your stuffs to everyone. What are you waiting for?

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To hide the quiz, you can either click the hide button and select hide yadayada quiz or simply hide the person, I prefer the latter. But if you don’t want to hide the friend but still want to hide the quizzes, facebook Purity saves your day.

First you’ll have to install Greasemonkey (works on Firefox) or Greasekit (works on Safari). And after that you can get the userscript here. Cool huh? Opera users, check out this article, looks like you can also run Greasemonkey userscripts in Opera. Chrome users are also in luck, check out this article.

Internet Explorer users, you’re on your own. Good luck.

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Some people are excited about the changes, some don’t. I personally can’t get used to the tab bar relocation so I looked for a solution to revert it back. There is the hard way, typing this and that into Terminal app but hey, let’s cheat and use the easier way.

Swoon dot net made a neat app that allows us to tweak the hidden preferences in Safari, such as relocate the tab bar to where it used to be. Installation is fairly simple, you can’t screw this up, really. Download the app here and run it.

My safari 4 buddy preferences

Press apply and restart your Safari. Voila! You’ve got your familiar-looking Safari with the massive new features :)

Note: if you are using Safari 4 on Windows and you’re looking for the hidden preferences: sorry, not your lucky day.

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We have a wide range of selection to help overcome the issue, but we’re going to use the cheapest and quickest one around: CutePDF Writer.

Installation

First we’ll download the free version of CutePDF Writer here, and then run the installer.

The installer will then prompt to download and install PS2PDF converter from CutePDF’s website, click yes and wait for the download and install to complete. Note: this requires working internet connection.

Done and done, now you can check your Control Panel > Printers and Other Hardware > View installed printers to check if the PDF Writer has been successfully installed.

How to use

Using PDF Writer is very simple, since it is installed as a printer what you have to do is to print your document with it. Do as you usually do to print (Ctrl + P) and select CutePDF Writer as your printer.

Proceed to the next printing step and you will be asked where you’d like to save the .pdf file. Choose a location and click save. That’s just about it, pretty easy huh?

Now you can print .pdf files from any application (given the app has the print functionality) in Windows :)

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Find and organize

After you install Picasa, it asks if you’d like to scan you entire computer or just the desktop, my pictures and my documents folders. Feel free to choose one of those options and Picasa will automatically scan your entire computer for JPEG, GIF, BMP, PSD even for movie files. And with just a couple of minutes your photos already organized by date and initially retained same file structure as your hard drive. The main area shows thumbnails of the images, and along the right side is a scroll bar to navigate. It’s pretty neat and simple.

Picasa gives you easy and powerful way to search your library. It’s has tag feature that allows you categories each photo and give them caption if you like. Looking to your albums or photos is not difficult anymore, you just type on the search field or you can filter them by showing only photos with faces or specific colors.

Create, edit and share

In Picasa you can create many ways to share your photos. By selecting some of them, you can create photo collage, video clip presentation, gift CD, or export it to another folder. All of those features are presented in simple and elegantly especially for photo collage which is I really love it.

If you double click a photo, you can enter an editing room to crop, fix red eye, straighten photos, adjust color, and apply special effects like film grain or soft focus. The editing room even has an I’m Feeling Lucky button, just like the Google search engine, which automatically applies recommended effects.

Sharing photos to your friends, family and to the world in Picasa is easy. You can select photos and email them as attachments. And if you’re Blogger user, you can post photos directly to your Blogger account. Picasa resizes the photos for the web for this, if you wish. You can also tell where you shot each photo and view them in Google Earth by using Geotagging. Uploading and synchronizing to the Web Albums is instant also.

Miniview

One of great feature that I really like from Picasa is Miniview. It is embedded to Windows Explorer and it represents nice preview for your picture even PSD. It’s really good feature because it’s avoids you from launching Picasa every time. On miniview you can zoom, rotate, slideshow and favorite your photos. And if you want to edit with it, just simply click Edit in Picasa and Picasa will be launched. Nice.

Overall

Picasa is very intuitive and well designed for amateurs and basic editing package. Its gives you a new experience for exploring your images library and it’s the best photo organization tools I’ve seen at any price. Picasa is a must-have application and most of all, it’s totally free.

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I’m not sure if it’s an iChat issue or Growl issue, but we have a solution :)

Chax aims to make your experience using iChat more enjoyable. Go to their site, download the installer and run it. It should prompt you to restart iChat after installation.

Chax’s preferences is located inside iChat preferences. There are many things you can do there, but for me the most important thing is to turn on the Growl notifications. There. Now I am a happier iChat user :)

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Neat innit? The problem is: GreaseMonkey cannot be installed in Safari, Mac OSX’s default browser (and by far my favorite one). Solution: GreaseKit. Here’s how.

First we’re going to have to install SIMBL. SIMBL is a software that lets you modify Cocoa applications. In this case, we’re modifying Safari.

After installing SIMBL, we can now proceed to installing GreaseKit (download it here). GreaseKit is not an application, it’s a SIMBL add on. Double click the DMG file and you’ll see this file:

Drag GreaseKit.bundle to OSX (this being your system root) > Library > Application Support > SIMBL > Plugins.

Install location - click to view larger image

Now restart your Safari app and check the menu bar, there will be an additional menu that says GreaseKit. That does it, now you can browse the available user scripts and install the ones you like :)

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Granted, you have the need to check your website/web app in popular browsers: Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 1, 2, 3, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Installing Chrome, Safari and Opera is a no-brainer, but those multiple versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox can be tricky. Here’s how we can do it.

Note: in this article I am using Windows XP with IE6 as a default browser. If you’re on Vista and you already have IE 7 installed you can skip the IE7 installation section.

Before we start, these are the installers we’re going to need. Don’t worry if you don’t have it yet, we will discuss about where (and how) to get them as we go.

Installing Internet Explorer 6 and 7

First we’re going to install IE7, this is also a no-brainer. Get it here and experience Microsoft’s long-ass installation and an unnecessary restart. Done and done with IE7, now we’re going to setup IE6. Download the Multiple IE installer, it’s free and it’s superuseful :)

Run the installer and keep going next until you see a checkbox selection like this:

If your target audience includes the good old Windows 98, 95 and Windows 3.1.1 users then definitely select them all. If that’s not the case then just leave it all unclicked except Internet Explorer 6.

Installing Firefox 1.5, 2 and 3

Thanks to this article, installing these browsers can be done easily. First you have to get all Firefox installers. Firefox 3 can be downloaded from this link, Firefox 2 here and Firefox 1.5 here.

I’d start with Fx 3 because that’s my favorite. Do a custom installation, choose where you want to install Firefox 3. In my case I want to install it here:

Next we’ll launch Firefox Profile Manager. This part’s a bit tricky so let’s pay extra attention here. What we’re going to do is we go to the Mozilla Firefox start menu folder by right-clicking the shortcut on the start menu.

Explore the Firefox start menu folder

Then we’re going into the duplicated shortcut’s properties by right-clicking the shortcut and select Properties. These are the values you’re going to change: in the Target field, add the following string: -profilemanager.

Shortcut Properties

Rename the shortcut to Profile Manager and launch it. We will need to create 3 different profiles for each Firefox installation. Here are my Firefox Profiles:

Firefox Profiles

Now you can install Fx 2 and 1.5 with custom installation, just remember to change the install directory. Your installation directory should look similar to what I have on the left side screenshot. We’re almost there, it’s a pretty long journey but we’re getting there.

Hang on.

Next step is the finishing strike. We’re going to put all the application shortcut to one place and modify the target just like we modify it on the Profile Manager section up there.

Here’s what we do, we add this string to the target field: -p “Fx 1″ where Fx 1 is the profile we made for that version of Firefox. Take a look at this screenshot for an example.

Et voila! That’s it! Now you have 3 Firefox installations running with different profiles. This means they can have different passwords saved, different bookmarks and so on. Please take a note that you can only run one Firefox instance at a time.

Have fun developing your website! :)

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