As part of an effor to better organize my site and all of the various source files I have floating around, I’ve begun to reorganize my site folders, and get everything put into Dreamweaver sites to help me manage it all.

I’ve also been using Subversion to manage all of my source files. The only problem was this: When I imported my site into SVN, it did it’s usual thing of creating a .svn folder for every folder. No biggie, however, while these are normally hidden in the Finder, they show up in Dreamweaver in the Files Panel, and when I tried to Synchronize my site, DW told me that I needed to upload nearly 3000 files.

I tried setting some cloaking options in the Site Manager, but no luck there. So I set about the task of manually cloaking each .svn folder. I did about five of them before I got tired of it, and decided to find an extension in the Macromedia Exchange. There I found an extension by “guppywon” that handles this for you. It installs two options into your Commands menu: “Cloak SCM Directories” and of course “Uncloak SCM Directories”.

These commands will run through your site and Cloak or Uncloak the SCM directories created by both SVN and CVS, and then let you know how many directories were affected. That’s about it, and doesn’t sound like much, but if you’ve had to deal with this issue, you’ll definately appreciate the time saved.

Link: Cloak/Uncloak SCM Directories in Dreamweaver

How to turn your dual-monitor PC into a dual mac-PC system

In what could be called “The Ultimate Testing Setup”, these folks have a setup that allows them to run both a Windows machine and a PowerBook from the same keyboard, mouse, and a monitor for each, without the delays you’d get in using a KVM switch. One monitor for OS X, the other for Windows. Check it out.

From: Andy (He did manage to graduate)

If you use SC Plugin to work with Subversion, you may have noticed that the icons used by SC Plugin to mark the status of a file aren’t always up to date. Apparently, this has something to do with how the Finder handles notifications that something has happened to the items in a particular folder.

This issue has been disscussed a few times on the SC Plugin mailing lists, and the author has posted a link to a free utility called Nudge, that can be used until SC Plugin can handle the updating of the icons correctly.

Installing Nudge adds an item to the contextual menu of Finder that allows you to “nudge”, or refresh the contents of a folder, and causes the icons in your SVN working copy to reflect their true status. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and it seems to work pretty good. If you use SVN on a Mac, you may want to check it out.

Link: http://www.brockerhoff.net/nudge/

These instructions will guide you through the process of installing and using the Subversion Client on OS X. Later I’ll do a post on how to setup your own SVN repositories, but for now it’s just how to setup the client to access repositories. The initial setup takes some time, (approx. 20-30 minutes), and you will need to use the Terminal, so pay attention, and we’ll get through this together.
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A while ago I was working on a project that required me to store the instance name of every movieclip on the stage in an external file. I wasn’t looking forward to this portion of the project because it would mean copying and pasting several hundred instance names. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do a for - in loop, because these names needed to be hard-coded into the file.

Luckily, I was able to use the new JavaScript API in Flash MX2004 to help me out. I wrote a quick command that loops through the movieclip instances on the stage, and prints their names to the output window, to be copied and pasted. I’ve since turned the command into a component, added some options to it, and posted it to the Macromedia Exchange to share it with others. It’s not the most amazing thing around, but it does what it’s supposed to, and it’s saved me some time on a few projects.

When you first select “Get Instance Names” from the Commands menu, you’ll be presented with a few options.

• You can prepend or append text to the instance name : _root. + [instanceName] + _visible
• You can choose to have the list of names output as a comment block : /* instanceNameList */
• Or, you can limit your output to only the items currently selected. But remember, this will only output instance names if the symbol has one.

You can download this component from the Flash Exchange: Get Instance Names

If you use this or find it useful, let me know. I’d also welcome any suggestions that you may have for features or improvements.