Built right into OS X Lion, Lion Recovery lets you repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without the need for a physical disc.

To do this all you’ll need is an external drive and the Recovery Tool available here http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1433.

To create an external Lion Recovery, download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant application. Insert an external drive (no bigger than 1GB), launch the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, select the drive or partition you would like it to install on, and follow the on screen instructions.

When the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant completes, the new partition will not be visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. To access Lion Recovery, reboot the computer while holding the Option key. Select Recovery HD from the Startup Manager.

F.Y.I. the Recovery Partition is usually 650mb in size.

If your getting something similar to this error:

-------------------------------------- Summary --------------------------------------
- 0 fatal error(s), 106 error(s), 0 warning(s)

ERROR: DW001: Set payload cancelled status

ERROR: DW049: Payload {007A2A28-D6A8-4D91-9A2B-568FF8052215} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {0175676F-8C92-49F2-9131-D0D6AD654B41} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {03FB981A-5170-11E0-A90E-3CEDE2AB3DC5} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {08EF22BC-43B2-4B4E-BA12-52B18F418F38} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {0A186736-9C62-48B2-B1DF-8A9C5CF7C997} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {0CCF0458-5171-11E0-BC45-DC59E3AB3DC5} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {0D96CFE6-376D-44B8-808A-16F3BEB73263} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {0DFE8222-EDF8-4D17-8CCE-614D630A32F5} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {11E1188F-E576-47BC-B215-600C02C7EABF} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {128cd5a7-6018-4360-b4c0-b0258b1a5a34} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {1A1E5FF9-D0FD-42A3-8E18-E5E7E95E1AB4} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {22C26C10-5C22-4674-A52C-100112664305} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {270C312D-7EC7-474C-BEB2-79CD398E02A3} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {2EA9B52E-8613-41A0-9EEF-FF54AD4CC810} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {3450d4c5-a82b-4428-a512-842ee1555a14} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {37AB3C65-E02C-4DCF-B0E0-4C2E253D8FA3} has an action "install" but no resultState
ERROR: DW049: Payload {3D51982E-45C6-4B4B-9362-B356E1610821} has an action "install" but no resultState

This looks to be caused by not having the necessary JAVA libraries on your system (typically the case with fresh installs of OSX as they come without JAVA by default), to fix this install the JAVA Update for OSX Lion http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1421

Once installed reboot & try installing again, if this time the installer simply hangs or beach balls on “Calculating Size” then it could be down to your user not having full rights to install services as ROOT, even though it asks you for your administrator password.

A simple way to fix this is to add your user to the WHEEL group, which is linked to root and has full permissions.

To do this, open Terminal then type:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -u yourusername -p -a yourusername -t user wheel

Replacing yourusername with your actual username, found by typing:

id

in terminal, you should see the first line similar to this,

uid=501(johnsmith)

in this case my username is johnsmith

once done you should now see you’ve been added to the group wheel

Restart your computer and re-run the installer, it should start to install now.

UPDATE: after still more problem we found that installing Adobe Flash Player manually allowed the installer to work and finally install.

…really wish Adobe would clean up their act with this, especially with what they’re charging us for.

OSX Lion is the latest incarnation of Apple’s flagship operating system and last week the official GM seed was sent to developers for testing. Yesterday I put it through it’s paces and have been happily surprised with the performance and improvements laid out in the latest release, attached is a quick video of Lion in action in all it’s one solid O/S.

To note,

• Launchpad for Apps (iOS)
• Mission Control
• FaceTime now integrated
• Address Book UI upgraded (more like iOS Books)
• Reset User Password via Apple ID
• Touchpad Gestures now a core part of the O/S
• Masses of UI improvements, gone and the rounded corners.
• Can set specific desktop background per Virtual Desktop / Space
• Fancy drag animation when moving files (gets out of the way of the cursor)
• Loads more…

On the App side everything still works pretty well, the following apps operate fine on Lion:

• Photoshop CS5
• Transmit
• Coda
• CornerStone SVN
• CSS Edit
• OmniGraffle
• VLC
• Tower
• TextMate
• MAMP & MAMP Pro

These Apps have visual problems that need fixing for Lion:

• Versions (opens main window & other regardless, sidebar cut-off)
• Espresso (desktop background seeps into interface)

Regarding official release date for OSX Lion my gut feeling says mid-July, in all the builds done and dusted just up to Apple to sign-off on things so you may be lucky and find it in the App Store this Tuesday.

Nice work Apple.

How to install FreeHand 11.0.2 Build 92 on Snow Leopard is actual really simple what is harder is to get Freehand to start.

After i installed FreeHand. FreeHand refused to start, its icon stays bouncing in the dock for a while before disappearing.

I spent some time trying to fix this and have found the perfect solution.

1) Make sure that Rosetta installed, Rosetts provides PPC code emulation allowing applications containing PPC code to run on Intel based Macs.

You can install Rosetta from your Snow Leopard installer disk. Insert it & click on the “Optional Installs” icon. In the folder, double-click on “Optional Installs.mpkg” & from there choose Rosetta from the Option Installs list. You can also install it by running a Power PC program then you’ll get a system prompt to download it and it will do it for you.

Tp find out if you already have a PPC app installed go to apple menu->about this mac>more info->applications and see if there are any PPC apps. If there is start the app and see if it runs. If the apps runs rosetta already, otherwise the system will offer to download it.

2) Install Macromedia Freehand MX

3) Adobe had published a solution to this, they say that the activation component of the software is incompatible with Mac OS X 10.6 preventing the application from launching successfully. Adobe recommends downloading a Freehand Registration File. And Installing it into ‘System\Library\Application Support\Macromedia’.

4) Start Freehand MX the program should open. A Freehand error box sometimes appears but the program still opens behind it and you can just close the error box and enjoy!!

— Michelle Clark

Introduction

Download here ~ https://github.com/johnantoni/vimfiles

What you see is my own personal VIM configuration, with all manner of plugins, color formats and cool status messages.

Feel free to fork and copy it as you want, you can even drop me a line to suggest improvements.

Best,

Install Config

git clone [url] ~/.vim
ln -nfs ~/.vim/vimrc ~/.vimrc
ln -nfs ~/.vim/gvimrc ~/.gvimrc

Install Command-T

cd ~/.vim/ruby/command-t
ruby extconf.rb
make

Afterwhich you’ll be able to use Command-T (aka Textmate Goto File) with \t

Build VIM from Source

Either download from vim.org and install with Mercurial or download from my github vim mirror with:

git clone git://github.com/johnantoni/vim.git
cd vim/src

Now if you’re in linux i’d recommend install vim with ruby support via

./configure --with-features=huge --enable-rubyinterp

But if your on OSX i’d recommend installing MacVIM as it’s got ruby support baked in (plus it’s a major pain to compile vim with ruby support in osx)

./configure --with-features=huge

Whatever you decide, compile and install with

make
sudo make install

If however you want to re-configure later, run this to clean the SRC directory before re-building:

make distclean

MacVim, HomeBrew and PeepOpen

For OSX users i’d recommend installing MacVIM rather than using the Terminal client. Along with that install HomeBrew, it’s a really efficient package manager for OSX.

And if you want the GoTo file that TextMate has (and CommandT provides) install PeepOpen from PeepCode, really awesome (and support already baked into this config)

Keys

\    leader key
i    switch to insert mode
esc  switch out of insert mode

With the CommandT plugin installed you can do a TextMate go-to file with \t After which you can start typing the file your after and it’ll zero in on it

Global .gitignore

Included with this git repository is a pretty decent .gitignore file which works quite well as the basis of your global ignore file.

To install the packaged .gitignore file to your global git config, do:

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.vim/.gitignore

NERDTree

Open with :NERDTree Create new file pressing ‘a’ Switch windows with CTRL+ww

Rebuild Help Docs

:helptags ~/.vim/doc