Apple has published a new reference to CSS support in Safari version 3 which any web developer concerned with Macintosh support will probably be interested in. You can download the reference as a PDF file so you can use it offline as well.

Safari version 3 is bundled with Leopard, included in the iPhone and is in beta for Windows.

The reference includes CSS properties that are Safari-specific and not supported by other browsers. While I’m not a proponent of using browser-specific extensions they can be helpful to enhance the experience for specific browsers.

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I haven’t been the only one annoyed by the problems with X11 in MacOS X 10.5 Leopard. I’m lucky enough to only really be depending on X11 out of habit rather than need, though. Folks who do depend on it have now managed to put together a new build of Xquartz, the library that interfaces X11 to the Macintosh Quartz drawing engine. The new build solves some of the problems people have been encountering.

You can find a rundown of issues involving X11 and Leopard on MacOS X Hints forums.

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I mentioned in MacOS X 10.5 Leopard, From a Developer’s Perspective that X11 under Leopard was seriously broken. There’s some new information on how to properly work with ith which helps quite a bit.

The confusion lies in a change in the way that the X server is started. In Tiger, when you wanted to use X11 you’d start the server manually. In Leopard, it’s started automatically via launchd, which controls the DISPLAY variable and detects when something’s trying to talk to the X server and starts it.

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Apple’s eagerly awaited operating system, MacOS X 10.5, also known as “Leopard”, is now in our hands, and there are quite a few features in it that will be interesting to developers. Amazon is still offering Leopard for $20 off list and Leopard Family Pack (5-user license) for $10 off list.

I do limited development on MacOS X. I don’t write Macintosh applications, but I do write web-based applications that I deploy to non-Macintosh servers. The Mac is a great environment for doing this; I get a real UNIX environment under the hood with Apache, MySQL and Perl, and a nice layer of Macintosh over the surface. After years of struggling with Windows and Cygwin, or living with Windows and Linux, it’s been wonderful moving to a single, reasonable environment for working.

Given that, my emphasis on development under Leopard will be on the kinds of tools a web developer might use, rather than XCode, although I’ll touch on XCode at the end.

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Last week, Wordpress 2.3.1 was released – a bug fix minor update to 2.3 which also corrects some security issues. It’s a strongly recommended update that should just drop in easily if you’re running 2.3 already.

As always, it’s available from http://www.wordpress.org/.
[tags]wordpress, update[/tags]

Apple has finally announced the release date for their new OS, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. You can pre-order Leopard at the Apple Store with free shipping and they promise it will arrive on Friday October 26th. You can also pre-order it at Amazon. Amazon is offering a $20 rebate when you order Leopard and Parallels at the same time, and is also currently charging $20 less for Leopard than Apple is. Amazon says they’ll ship Leopard on Friday October 26th.

Check it out at the Apple Store (click here) or at Amazon (click here).
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Coding Horror offers a primer on SQL JOINs using set theory’s Venn diagrams.

Venn diagrams are a very convenient mechanism for visualizing the union and intersection of two sets. Think of each table in a database a set. This primer illustrates how various SQL JOINs between tables can be visualized as unions and intersections.

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The latest version of Wordpress became available last night, and it looks to be a pretty major release.

Probably the biggest feature in it is that it supports tags without any additional plugins required. I had been planning on writing an article on Ultimate Tag Warrior, the tagging plugin I’ve been using, but its author retired it a while back because of the new tagging support upcoming in Wordpress 2.3. The new release supports importing tag info from several previous tagging plugins.

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Love it or hate it… well… does anyone really love Internet Explorer?

But you have to live with it, at least if you’re doing web development, because it’s necessary to test against it. It’s so buggy that many people code first against it, make their site work on it (given that it has the bulk of the browser market share) and then try to get their site working with other, less buggy, more standards-compliant browsers without breaking their Internet Explorer compatibility.

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I needed to write a query using DBIx::Class tonight that would return rows where a column wasn’t null. The first couple of ways I tried to didn’t work – here’s how to do it:

$result = $schema->resultset('RESULTSET')->search({ column => { '!=' => undef }});

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