I don’t use the Dashboard in Mac OS X as much as I expected to when it was first released, but when I do, one of the few widgets I employ is Delivery Status, which keeps track of packages during shipment. Big, bold numbers display the days until delivery, and smaller text reports on various stops throughout the package’s voyage. With support for over 30 carriers, including all of the most common here in the U.S., Delivery Status conveys what you need to know at a glance, making it an ideal Dashboard widget. Also in the works is an iPhone/iPod Touch application serving the same purpose with an interface optimized for touchscreen devices.

Lately I’ve been working with Mozilla’s XUL platform under xulrunner, and found that I needed to make a properly branded Windows application, but had no tools or knowledge on how to “glue” standard .ico icon files together, or insert them into an already-compiled .exe file. After some research and a little trial and error, I found a method that works. Assuming you have some prepared 16, 24, 32, and 48 pixel images suitable for an icon set, here’s how to go about getting them from Photoshop into a Windows application, using only free software.

Photoshop to Multiple .ico Files
The first step to branding a generic executable with your own icons is to get them out of the graphics program and into .ico format, which is the standard for Windows software icons and cursors. IcoFormat, a free Photoshop import/export plugin for handling .ico files, will easily handle the task. Once installed to your Photoshop plugins folder (and Photoshop subsequently restarted), you can save each of your icons as a .ico file using “Save As…”, and choosing ICO from the Format menu in the resulting dialog. Repeat for each icon size you wish to embed (or, if you’re ambitious, try recording a Photoshop action to automate the process).

Multiple .ico Files to One .ico File
To allow Windows to display the best size icon for the current folder view, it’s best to combine the desired .ico files into a single file. The free Icollator program will take in multiple icons and produce a single .ico file ready for embedding. You may need the Java Runtime Environment to run Icollator, if you don’t already have it. Like Icollator, JRE is also free download.

Embed the .ico File
The last step is to embed the single .ico file (containing two or more icons) into the .exe. Launch the freeware Resource Hacker utility, and Open the target .exe. Then select Action -> “Add a new Resource…”, and pick the combined .ico file you made in the previous step. Give the resource a simple name like “ICONS”, and click Add Resource. Save the changes to the .exe, and switch to Windows Explorer. You’ll notice that the .exe now has the embedded icon set, and Windows will show the correct size icon for the current view mode. Also, you’ll notice that Resource Hacker made a backup of the .exe before embedding, just for safe keeping.

Also potentially of interest: Getting application name and icon right with XULRunner from the AdBlock Plus blog

In my endless configuration with my computer set-up, I ran into my second major issue with Boot Camp, and managed to find a working solution worth documenting. Starting with a single Mac OS X Leopard volume, Boot Camp Assistant kept failing and reporting “not enough space left on device” while attempting to live-partition my hard drive into two partitions for OS X and Windows (newer versions of Mac OS X can partition hard drives while booted, without any formatting). However, I had over 50% of the drive’s capacity free, so there should have been lots of space left on the drive. Clearly something was amiss…

Having started out with computers as a relatively old school Mac user — one who had to backup and erase a hard drive to partition it — I was immediately suspicious of the new-ish live-partition tool. To work around that, I tried booting the Leopard DVD and running Disk Utility from the Utilities menu, then partitioning the drive using that method. Again, I was met failure, but with an ambiguous “partition error” on which Disk Utility did not elaborate. The “Verify Disk” command reported that my volume was in good shape, despite my suspicions of corruption. DiskWarrior 4 also confirmed that the volume’s directory structure was intact. With 90+ GB free on my MacBook Pro’s 160 GB disk, how could I have “not enough space” to simply slice off a 20 GB Windows partition for run-of-the-mill use?

Out of quick-fix ideas, I decided to back up my Mac OS X volume, erase the drive, partition it, restore my OS X image to the big partition, then install Windows to the new smaller partition. Without a network-ready imaging utility like Ghost or TrueImage for Mac OS X (are there any?), I had to do this a slightly more complicated way:

1. Boot Mac OS X and connect to a network share on another computer (a networked PC, in my case).
2. Run SuperDuper! and back up the entire contents of the drive to the other computer.
3. When done, boot the Leopard DVD and run Disk Utility again, and erase and partition the drive into one HFS+ Journaling partition for Mac OS X and one FAT32 partition for Windows.
4. Boot a Windows CD, and “quick format” the FAT32 partition to NTFS (since Disk Utility can’t natively create an NTFS volume), then install Windows.
5. Install Boot Camp drivers from the Leopard DVD: The Windows volume on the Leopard DVD contains the necessary Boot Camp drivers. Nice touch, Apple!
6. Boot from the Leopard DVD again, but run Terminal this time — there’s no point-and-click way to connect to a network share from the DVD…
7. Typically, you’d do mount_smbfs to connect to a Windows share, but it failed with “mount_smbfs: failed to load the smb library: Unknown error: 1102″ (No luck with mount -t smbfs, either). mount_afp appears to work, though.
8. With no way to use SMB to get at the imaged Mac OS X volume made earlier, I downloaded a trial version of Extreme-Z IP, which provides AFP file and printer sharing support for Windows. After skipping prompts about Printer Sharing and automatically importing my SMB/Windows shares, it worked beautifully.
9. Back at the Terminal on the MacBook, mkdir /Volumes/Sharename; mount_afp afp://username:password@192.168.1.10/Sharename /Volumes/Sharename mounted Sharename from the PC onto /Volumes/Sharename on the Mac over Ethernet. (The hidden /Volumes/ folder is where all connected Mac volumes show up).
10. Back under Disk Utility, I was almost able to Restore the disk image to the proper volume over the network as if it were a local volume, but… it was grayed out in the file picker dialog.
11. The “Scan Image for Restore” button resulted in a failed process, but it DID add the disk image to the sidebar of Disk Utility, which enabled drag-and-drop such that I could restore it to the HFS+J volume.

After a few hours of restoring data, my MacBook Pro is back, with Mac OS X on one volume just as I left it right before the imaging, and a fresh Windows install on the other. Surely Apple never meant for Boot Camp to be this complicated, but they underestimated the extent of my tinkering and day-to-day use! I hope my documentation can help someone in a similar situation…

Resources:
Apple Support Discussions - Full restore from a remote disk
AFP Third Party implementations

Firefox 3 was released just yesterday, bringing a wealth of new features to be excited about. From faster launch time and better memory management to interface polish and glitz, and over 8 million downloads already, Firefox 3.0 is truly a gem among modern web browsers.

For those that do web development, though, the 3.0 release means another round of website compatibility testing in both the earlier release and now the current one. For the most part, this isn’t a new challenge, but Firefox can be a bit peculiar: Upon launching Firefox, it checks to see if another instance is already running, and if found, brings up a new browser window of the currently running version. So, launching Firefox 2.0 while 3.0 is running results in two 2.0 windows, and vice versa for 3.0. This effectively stops the casual user from simultaneously running both Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 side by side. As an added side effect, when you completely shut down Firefox and launch a different major version, your profile information can get skewed, resulting in sometimes strange bookmark appearance and lots of checking for updates to installed add-ons. With a little tweaking, though, Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 can be convinced to run independently, each with their own bookmarks and add-ons.

Mac OS X Instructions
Running two versions of Firefox under Mac OS X couldn’t be simpler. The freeware application MultiFirefox takes all the guesswork out of the process by automatically detecting Firefox versions in your main Applications folder and presenting you with a list from which to choose the Firefox versions you’d like to launch. Complete with self-updating (thanks to the ubiquitous Sparkle framework), MultiFirefox is the easiest way to pull off this multi-browser stunt.

Windows Instructions
If you already have Firefox (2.0 or 3.0) installed, it’s important to back up your crucial information before getting started. Navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox and copy your “Profiles” folder somewhere safe.

Once backed up, download Firefox 2 and/or Firefox 3, depending on what you already have installed. Launch each installer and begin setting up Firefox, but make sure to choose Custom settings. When asked for a place to install Firefox, change the path(s) to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3\ (or …\Mozilla Firefox 2), instead of just “Mozilla Firefox”. In doing so, you’ll place Firefox 2 at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2\, and Firefox 3 at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3\. Both versions of Firefox should now be in separate folders. (If you already have one version of Firefox installed at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\, you may choose to leave that where it is and just install the other version in a separate folder, however you’ll have to make a note of which is where, and modify the following instructions accordingly.)

Create a new shortcut to Firefox 2.0 by right-mouse-button-dragging C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2\firefox.exe to your Desktop (for now), and choosing “Create Shortcuts Here”. Name the shortcut “Firefox 2″. Repeat for Firefox 3, changing “2″ to “3″ where appropriate.

You’re almost there, but now we have to tell Firefox to keep the two instances separate. Open the Properties window for the Firefox 3 shortcut, and add “ -ProfileManager” (space key, minus sign, ProfileManager) to the end of the string of text in the Target field. Click OK, then run that same shortcut to bring up Firefox’s Profile Manager. Rename the existing “default” profile to “firefox3″, and also create a new “firefox2″ profile:

Once profiles are set, exit Firefox completely. With two profiles in place, each version of Firefox can have its own bookmarks, extensions, and other settings, without interfering with each other. Open up the properties windows for both the Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 shortcuts you made. Remove the -ProfileManager addition from the Firefox 3 shortcut Target, replacing it with -no-remote -p firefox3 (space key, minus sign, no-remote, space key, minus sign, ‘p’ key, space key, firefox3). Add the same to the Firefox 2 shortcut, again changing the 3 to a 2. Both shortcuts should now have the -no-remote option set, as well as -p followed by the designated profile that matches that Firefox’s version. In short, Firefox 3 gets the firefox3 profile, and Firefox 2 gets the firefox2 profile, seen below:

Click OK on both shortcuts to confirm the changes, and finally double-click each to run Firefox 2 and 3 at the same time!

Also, don’t miss LifeHacker’s Power User’s Guide to Firefox 3 for some excellent 3.0 tips and tricks, as well as ArsTechnica’s briefing of what’s to come in Firefox 3.1.

6/28/2008 Update
Here’s another excellent tutorial on running Firefox 2 and 3 at the same time, including notes on the -no-remote switch and how it can make Firefox claim it’s “already running but not responding.” That firefox.exe switch appears to be a bit of a double-edged sword.