When doing desktop applications we typically need to create installers if we don’t have the luxury of playing back from a CD-ROM. For Windows we use InstallShield. For the Mac we haven’t had a need, for our last desktop applications like The Keller Williams Red Pages on the Macintosh version we just had directions for the end user to copy the application folder to their hard drive. I have used Installer Vise, which is a cross platform installer. Vise isn’t a bad solution and worth looking into. It’s been a few years since I used it (at least 5 years ago), but there is a pricing model.

I came across an open source project EasyEclipse that is free and looks like it will fill the needs for Macintosh installers.

Of course any desktop development we seem to be moving to Adobe Apollo so building a custom and full installer is not necessary as the Apollo Framework handles the install.

My biggest beef with my 15″ MacBook Pro is the 80 gig hard drive that it came with. With the amount of video, images and source files I routinely use I find myself transferring things to our server as well as to DVD to make room. I currently have 11 gigs available.

Luckily, there seems to be a pretty good solution by MCE Technologies. Their MobileStor Performance Hard Drive Upgrade comes in hard drives with storage of 100, 120, 160 and 250GB. The 250GB drive is currently priced at $279. The one downside of the 250GB drive is that it’s only 5400rpm and not the 7200rpm that some of their smaller drives have. All drives include an external enclosure for the original drive and has both eSATA and USB 2.0 ports.

I’ve been planning on buying a video output cable for my iPod. SendStation has announced a new iPod accessory that simplifies the output from an iPod to other electronic devices like a TV. The solutions I had seen before was a cable that attached to the 7″ output on the iPod. SendStations Pocket Dock AV attaches to the docking of the iPod and thus has outputs for USB, audio, composite and S-Video. By using s-Video or composite video from the dock the quality should be noticably better than going from the 7″ speaker output on the iPod.

A solution like this will allow you to display your iPod video on virtually any TV. Imagine being able to show a client your shackcasting tours on their TV while you are doing a listing presentation.

I’ve ran into a situation in iTunes where I have video blog content or movies that I create not syncing with my iPod. Instead I get this error:

I tracked the problem down to the profile in the MPEG settings for H.264 video. I had to set the Restrict Profile(s) to Baseline. I was specifically using QuickTime Pro, however, this setting should be set in any video editing application. I’m not sure what issues there might be there for Windows users.

Adobe Consulting has updated the Flex Style Explorer. This app is integral in building Flex 2.0 applications when it comes to going beyond the default look for Flex applications. Check it out at http://examples.adobe.com/flex2/consulting/styleexplorer/Flex2StyleExplorer.html

R.I.P. The couch made it through many deadlines and meetings, Barbra Morris never gave me a straight up answer of where she got it. We always speculated it was probably something like that old VW commercial but it was Barbra and Carol driving around with the couch in their Mercedes that they found on the side of the road. It functioned a lot better than it looked, I especially remember catching a few minutes of sleep while we were in the middle of the death march of Math Expeditions.

Here’s a free resource for icons that can be used in your next Flex or Apollo application:

http://www.aspneticons.com/

In my effort to get WordPress mu set up I’ve been running into issues with getting multiple domains set up. I want new sites to fall under shackcasting.com domain, but for those that want to brand their pocket tours with their own domain I want to have the ability for them to point a host like blog.domain.com. I found a helpful thread in the mu forum for doing this type of set up.

I think I’m getting close, I can log in to the admin under blog.aspentreemedia.com, I still need to test uploading photos, comments and themes.

UPDATE: I did run into a problem where new pages would not work, the default About page worked but any new page would go to the sign up page. I was able to fix it by changing the vhost to true in wp-config.php. Here’s what I changed:

define(’VHOST’, ‘yes’);