Big Bad Code

Problem:

Arduino and Processing IDE’s both are java applications and don’t use anti-aliasing when displaying fonts on OS X.

Solution:

Add the Java Swing options to enable anti aliasing to the Info.plist file that OS X uses to launch the IDE’s.

Steps:
Right click the Arduino.app in the Finder and select ‘Show Package Contents’, double click the Contents directory and there you will find the Info.plist file. Open it in a text editor of your choice.
Add the following two lines under the Java option. See the screenshot for the exact location.

<key>VMOptions</key>
<string>-Dswing.aatext=true</string>

Now your code editor goes from looking like this crapness:

To this hotness:

And even better you can use great looking fonts like Inconsolata and get an editor that looks this good:

I’ve recently re-installed OSX and lost my quicklook support for .mxml and .as files. Since I couldn’t find whatever packages I had installed that allowed that quicklook support, I’ve modified QLColorCode to add support for previewing both .as files and .mxml files.

It works on my computer and I hope that it’ll work on yours too.

Please feel free to download my version, qlcolorcodeqlgenerator unzip and install, let me know if it doesn’t work.

Installation instructions for quicklook plugins can be found here.

-josh

When developing AIR applications under flexbuilder you may get a situation where the app is stuck in an unresponsive state and refuses to quit itself.

To kill it quickly on a Mac you can do the following from a terminal:

ps -A | grep adl


That will return a line that looks something like this

18132 ?? S 0:22.97 /Users/joshbloom/Applications/flexb_183522/Adobe Flex Builder 3/sdks/3.0.0/bin/adl -runtime /Users/joshbloom/Appl
18148 p1 S+ 0:00.00 grep adl

The number at the beginning of the first line first line indicates the process ID of your unresponsive AIR app.

To kill it you would run this command:

kill -9 18132


Be careful what number you put into the kill command, it will happily kill anything you tell it to. If you make a mistake you may have killed your window manager, your instant messenger or even something important like your twitter client.