Today, almost 9 months since my last release, I am happy to release an updated version of the program. The new updated version will allow users to upload PDF documents, a very much requested feature.

You can download the new version from the Google Code project site.

I had been doing everything I could to get Google to add PDF uploading capabilities to their API. I even submitted an official issue, which generated 73 comments and 136 stars, making it “the most requested feature.” Last Friday, Google finally responded by releasing version 3.0 of their API which supported PDF uploading.

The entire development of this project happens in my free time, on an old iBook G4. Unfortunately, because the latest version of OS X will not run on this old laptop, I cannot ensure that the app works on Snow Leopard, nor can I fix it if it doesn’t. I’ll probably think about creating a cross-platform version of the app which would run on Windows, Mac, or Linux through Adobe Air, providing greater platform stability.

If you would like to send me a monetary thank you gift for developing this, please consider donating through paypal.

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There are bug fixes, better error dialogs, a new icon (used under a creative commons license) and uploading of photos into Picasa Web Albums. A bulleted list of changes is published in the project wiki.

GDocsUploader is a small Mac OS X program that I wrote to quickly upload documents to Google Docs, simply by dragging and dropping a document icon onto the uploader icon.

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I had never written any sort of real Mac application, so I just kind of glued something together out of Python, applescript, and a couple of helper apps. I threw the source up at Google Project Hosting, which has been good, because otherwise I would have been supporting the thousands of downloads.

Recently, my little droplet app became more famous. It was featured on lifehacker.com as a featured Mac Download. My favorite line from their post was, “Gdocsuploader is still new and a bit unpolished.” I think it should be considered more than just a bit unpolished. They should have said, “this thing might work, and is about as unpolished as lava rock.”

There have been a multitude of other posts about my little project:

• Web Worker Daily claims it could save you a bit of friction.
• VinodLive says it shines with some cool drag and drop options
• i use this shows 2 people are using it. I wonder how many people use i use this.
• samjones jaiku’ed it saying it saves time. Erik also jaiku’ed it when he added it to his del.icio.us bookmarks.
• Geekout.tv actually mentioned me by name! Thanks to them for the nice personal reference
• It hass even gone international at macworld.idg.se. I don’t know what they’ve said, but I hope it is nice.

Thanks to everyone who wrote something nice about it.

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• Adium – Instant messenger built with libpurple.
• Firefox – Web Browser
• NeoOffice – OpenOffice.org port
• Smultron – a nice, simple code editor. Integrates well with Cyberduck.
• Cyberduck – A SFTP client. Please read my full review.
• Quicksilver – a fast application launcher
• Komodo Edit – my new favorite small code IDE
• The Gimp – graphics editing program that requires X11
• Platypus – packages python/perl/php/shell scripts as double-clickable OS X applications.

Those are my favorite, most used apps. You should also check out this list of mac apps, some of which I’ve used either on the mac or other platforms, others I plan on trying soon.

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iCal Server uses open calendaring protocols for intergrating with leading calendar programs, including iCal 3 in Leopard, Mozilla’s Sunbird, OSAF’s Chandler, and Microsoft Outook.

The same sentence recently changed to omit any reference to outlook:

iCal Server uses open calendaring protocols for intergrating with leading calendar programs, including iCal 3 in Leopard, and popular CalDAV clients from Mozilla, Open Source Application Foundation and others.

So what does this change mean? Seeing as Outlook interoperability was one kick trash feature, the fact that it is now omitted from the features page probably means that it isn’t going to happen. Which is way too bad. We can only wonder what bounced Outlook out of the release party. Was it too hard to develop or support an Outlook plugin? Or were there patent or other legal issues? We can hope, however, that maybe we will be delivered Outlook interoperability in some future release.

If you want a calendar for your organization, you could try Google Apps for Your Domain. It includes Google’s calendar product, and any user with a modern web browser can use it. The user interface is really quite excellent. It doesn’t, however, provide excellent connectors to and CalDAV calendar clients.

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Like I said, Cyberduck does a great job at integrating with the rest of the OS X system.  It has plugins for Growl and Quicksilver.  It seamlessly integrates with a good set of editors.   It takes advantage of Bonjour, Spotlight, and the OS X keychain, and can use iDisk for synchronizing bookmarks.

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NeoOffice is a version of OpenOffice.org rebuilt entirely for the mac.  I’ve been using versions of NeoOffice for some time, but it has finally hit a level of maturity that makes me feel more confortable about showing it off.  The latest version, 2.1, is available for download and is based off of OpenOffice.org version 2.1.

This is the first version of NeoOffice that is completely convincing as a mac application. Mac applications in general tend to have a very clean, easy to use interface, and NeoOffice 2.1 follows the trend.  Added bonuses include the fact that it does not require X11, integrates well with other mac applications like Mail, and is compatible with the latest Microsoft Office formats.  By default, NeoOffice uses the OpenDocument formation, which is also compatible with Google Docs.

On older Macs, NeoOffice might take a bit of time to start up, although I suspect that on the newest Intel Macs this time will be quite acceptable.  If anyone would like to donate an Intel Mac to me so I can verify it, please contact me immediately.

NeoOffice is open source software, which means that you can download and use it for free.  If you need a free, quality word processor or office suit for the Mac OS X, I highly suggest NeoOffice.

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I untarred the archive, and I cd’ed into the untarred folder. At this point, I thought I would follow the getting started guide on running the Kitchen Sink example in hosted mode.

I cd’ed into samples/KitchenSink/ and ran the ./KitchenSink-shell script. At this point I got an error message:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Unable to load required native library 'gwt-webkit'
Your GWT installation may be corrupt
at com.google.gwt.dev.shell.mac.LowLevelSaf.init(LowLevelSaf.java:180)
at com.google.gwt.dev.BootStrapPlatform.go(BootStrapPlatform.java:10)
at com.google.gwt.dev.GWTShell.main(GWTShell.java:264)


I did a little bit of Google searching, and I found that someone else had the same problem. He mentioned Issue #300 which I looked at, and it said it was fixed. The problem was something having to do with a case-sensitive filesystem, which I think is odd because I thought all Macs were pretty standard with their case-sensitive filesystems. So I’m not sure if I just have to wait until the next release or if it is still broken or what.

Hopefully it will get fixed soon though because I have a limited amount of free time right now to work on my new project and using GWT on it I think would be sweet.

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http://macgpg.sourceforge.net is the best place to start off. If you want to understand in great depth about all the stuff, you should read the FAQ document (RTF).

First download and run the GNU Privacy Guard installer. This will install all the GPG tools onto your system. However, unless you like using the command line, you probably want to install a couple of graphical programs. I suggest GPG Keychain Access which will help you create and manage keys. I also suggest GPGPreferences which will help you configure the GPG tools, although you probably won’t need to do much with it.

You will probably want to create yourself a key which you will use to sign your emails. You can do this in the GPG Keychain Access program.

Next, you will want to make sure your email program is configured to use your GPG key. If you are using Mozilla Thunderbird, then you can install the GPG plugin called Enigmail. If you are using Apple’s Mail program, you should download, install, and use a plugin available here.

Follow any of these instructions at your own risk. I am not responsible if you or these programs screw up your computer.

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Configuring and Running X11 Applications on Mac OS X

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