mac

As soon as latest versions of Drupal 6 work supposedly fine with PHP 5.3 I decided to give it a try with OSX 10.6 bundled PHP version. Many would say it misses mcrypt, but I don't need it at the moment. Here are a few tips on how to make web development environment working on Snow Leopard. Actually it's probably complete walk trough for majority of cases.

If you will Google it a bit there are many complains for this issue: why the colors on my photo uploaded to some website are not so vibrant as on my laptop/desktop?!? The answer is pretty simple: mismatched color profile.

A bit of technical background (let's take jpeg image format and sRGB color space as most used): the ColorProfile is embedded as text (aka metadata) string in you jpeg file. And it will not touch any image pixel data stored in jpeg. In ideal world your hardware and software (say operating system, display, video card, browser, printer etc) should read and obey it to give your image the colors according to embedded metadata. But unfortunately it is not yet so despite ICC standards are available for many years.

Since OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) I've gone supposedly easy way using MAMP as dev server. I never really liked it but now it was insane: turned out MAMP is so hogging the system on OSX 10.6. The only way was to have some native 64-bit server running PHP 5.2.x. I really feel that 64-bit apps are much faster at least at releasing some valuable RAM.

Being quite geek I'm one of those early adopter guys. So wonder what? I've migrated my Aperture 2 library to just released Aperture 3. You may wonder why wouldn't I use Lightroom, but well, I just like Apreture's workflow + look and feel a bit more. That's it. Also faces and locations in Aperture 3 (apparently migrated from iPhoto) are just killer features comparing to Lightroom.