Finally back, with Glimmer on the Mac

So, I haven't blogged for a while as I've been busy in the last few months looking for homes, moving to a new place in Chicago, finishing work on a big client project, and joining a new Ruby on Rails project at our Obtiva main office (The Obtiva Studio.) My Windows laptop, which had all my Glimmer work got stolen. So, I got a Mac Book Pro, and that became the perfect excuse for me to get Glimmer working on the Mac. The key thing I learned about making Glimmer work on the Mac is that you need to run Java for JRuby with this switch "-XstartOnFirstThread" or else the SWT library, which Glimmer relies on, will freeze when attempting to trigger any UI events (mouse-click, tabbing, etc...) One way of doing so is to simply append that switch at the end of a jruby call. Example: jruby samples/hello_world.rb -XstartOnFirstThread A better way for the long-term though is to embed that switch in the Java environment variables or the jruby script file. One last thing to note is that if you get Glimmer through the Gem and run it, it automatically gets a Ruby Facets gem that is more recent than the one originally used to develop Glimmer. Its API had a change that breaks Glimmer, so to fix it, replace all references of camelcase() in Glimmer's code-base with camelcase(false) (references are in r_widget.rb I believe.) I am in the process of doing the long-due task of committing Glimmer's code into the Eclipse SVN repository. Once I have that done, I'll ensure it includes the Facets fix, and I'll blog about the commit. Happy Mac Glimmering!