Apple’s new operating system, Snow Leopard, hits the shelves tomorrow morning. Here’s a quick guide to get you through the upgrade process with as little pain as possible.

Check Your Compatibility

Snow Leopard is the first Apple OS to abandon the old PPC architecture that Macs  used to run on. This means that only Intel-based Macs will be able to run it, but what Apple have been somewhat quiet about is that old apps written for the PPC and not upgraded to use Intel probably won’t work either.

There’s a compatibility list of applications for Snow Leopard, so check carefully everything that you rely on beforehand. One of the biggies on the list is Adobe CS2 – still in use by a lot of people due to the high cost of upgrading.

Those used to Growl notifications may have to wait a little while for a new version of the app – there are conflicting reports as to whether it works properly. Also be wary of old versions of Parallels, which will no longer run.

Make Your Backups

It always goes without saying to backup your important data before modifying your OS. If you want a failsafe solution, you can use SuperDuper to create a bootable backup of your Leopard install on an external hard drive. You can then fallback on this install by booting your Mac with the Option key held down.

Have a Clear Out

Take the opportunity to have a clear out of your Applications directory before you upgrade. Remove anything you haven’t used in a while and take out any applications that extend or modify your existing Leopard install. Things like this rarely survive the transition between versions and will generally do more harm than good.

Do A Fresh Install

Reports are emerging that the Snow Leopard “Upgrade Disk” will actually install Snow Leopard regardless of whether there is an existing Leopard install. If you’ve got your data backed up and well-organized and you really want a fresh and clean OS then you can wipe your existing hard drive and install Snow Leopard from new.

PHP’s GD functions allow you to write text onto an image using any fonts you have available to you. There are different functions available for the different types of fonts. First, we’ll go through how to get the font files from your Mac.

Fontbook

Open up “Font Book” from your “Applications” folder and you’ll see all the fonts installed on your system and available to you. You can scroll through and preview them as you normally would.

Ctrl-Click on a font in the list and click “Reveal in Finder” to open a new Finder window with that font highlighted. If you highlight a grouped font (i.e. one that has Regular, Bold, Italic etc under it, then all of the files will be highlighted).

Multiple Export

If you need to work with a few fonts, then you can highlight multiple fonts using the usual Cmd and Shift keys and then select “Export Fonts…” from the “File” menu. Pick a folder to save them in and all the font files will be copied there for you.

Extensions

Now that you’ve got the files, you need to look at the extensions of the files to figure out which type they are:

• .ttf (True Type font)
• .otf (OpenType font)
• .dfont (Apple Datafork Truetype)

True Type Fonts

TrueType fonts can be added to your GD image using the imagettftext() function.

Apple Datafork Truetype

These are bundles of TrueType fonts used on Mac systems. In order to use these in PHP, we again use the imagettftext() function, but first we have to extract the TTF files from the bundle. For this, we use a program called fondu. More information is available at the fondu homepage, but here’s a quick guide to getting it up and running:

• Download and unzip the latest version
• Open up Terminal and change to the newly-unzipped fondu folder
• Issue the command “./configure”
• Issue the command “make”

You will now have a “fondu” executable, amongst others, in that folder. Use this command to extract the TrueType files from the Datafork file.

./fondu /path/to/fontfile.dfont

You will now have a series of .ttf files in your fondu folder.

After a successful day bookmarking, I was buoyed up for Day 2 In The Cloud. Today, I was going to tackle the all-to-common problem of not having a particular document to hand when you need it, by starting to use an online word processor and spreadsheet system.

There’s a simple choice in this market – Google Docs. But after an incredible frustrating morning, I’d come across the following problems:

• I’d keep opening documents and they would display while they were loading, but then go blank. Google’s answer to this was to clear my cache. This apparently works for 90% of users, but I seem to be in the other 10%, who are screwed.
• Very common and persistent network errors, which basically lead me getting pretty annoyed with the arrogance of this error message:

Google Docs Network Error

Oh, no problem, I’ll just “stop working” for a while.

So, I went on the look for a more obscure solution to this problem. And I came across Zoho. I wasn’t too sure about this, but as it let me log-in using my existing Google Account, it was simple enough to try. What I found beneath the somewhat primary-school interface was nothing short of incredible.

Zoho is a fully-featured and fully-integrated office suite. I can browse files and folders created through Zoho or upload files directly to it from my machine. The word processor and spreadsheet applications that I’ve tried are very responsive and feature-rich. Short of a macro / scripting language, there’s everything that you can get on the desktop.

The sharing features are pretty extensive, allowing you to publish documents as Web pages or e-mail viewer and contributor links out to members of your team. In addition to what I’ve tried so far, there’s also a database application, project manager, CRM, mailbox and meeting scheduler amongst others. In short, you must try this application out as soon as possible.

I seem to be in the throws of yet another hard drive failure on one of my machines today and I find myself considering, for the first time, moving into cloud computing. If you’re not familiar with the term, cloud computing is essentially using software services rather than software products, working with files stored for you by various online providers.

Although not new (you could argue that Yahoo Mail is cloud computing and that’s been around forever), it’s only recently that more advanced applications like document production or image-editing have moved online.

My previous issues with the cloud though have been to do with trust. I’m simply not sure how much information I want to store on a company’s server. This data is often said to be anonymous, but is it? I think the best you can hope for is pseudo-anonymity. You account may not be linked to your name, address and other details etc. but all you’ve got to do is store a couple of personal letters there and that anonymity has disappeared.

But as with everything, there’s a toss-up between pros and cons. The cons I’ve just discussed. The pros of the situation are that you have access to your information wherever you are and you don’t have to spend a Sunday trying to restore from a backup or get that last little bit of information off of a dyeing hard drive.

So, I’m going to take the plunge and see if I can make my life any easier by moving everything online. Wish me luck and I’ll let you know how I get on.

A quick post on compatibility with Firefox 2 when using inline-block elements. An inline-block element is one with the “display:” property set to “inline-block” in order for it to flow within text whilst giving you access to block-level properties such as padding and margins.

In a recent project, I used these quite extensively to create links with larger clickable areas that had an background image attached to the left hand side and then some left padding to move the text so the image could be seen. It’s a simple trick, but it will not necessarily work with some version of Firefox 2.

Here’s the trick – we need to use an extended Mozilla property value, called -moz-inline-box (note that’s box, not block). So, the CSS for my links looked like this:

a.More {
  background: url('images/more.gif') no-repeat left middle;
  display: inline-block;
  display: -moz-inline-box;
  height: 16px;
  padding-left: 16px;
}