I’ve found a number of step by steps to set this up on a Windows machine, the most in-depth being on Lifehacker. However, I haven’t found a quick one to set up multiple profiles on the Mac.

My reason for wanting to do this was pretty simple; I wanted to be able to play with Firefox3 while still using Firefox2 and the magic of Firebug for debugging and web development. As I knew from the many PC articles I just needed to set up a profile for each browser. Since I already had Firefox2 in my Applications folder (Firefox.app) I opened up terminal and ran /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -ProfileManager which brings up a screen allowing you to manage existing profiles and create new ones it should look something like this… As you can see I’ve already added the profile, yours will probably only have one profile called default and will have the “Don’t ask at startup” checked. The first thing I did was rename the default profile to Firefox2 (since that is what I already had installed and had been using). Then I created a new profile called Firefox3 and unchecked “Don’t ask at startup”. Easy as pie. After that I renamed Firefox.app in my Applications folder to Firefox2.app, downloaded the Firefox3 beta, copied it to Applications and renamed it to Firefox3.app.

The drawback is that whenever I launch either application it asks me which profile to use and I have to select the profile I want. I probably could edit the actual shell script at /Applications/Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox and /Applications/Firefox3.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox respectively and hardcode the -P option in order to avoid this minor hassle but at this point it doesn’t seem worth it.

Update: after realizing I knew how I would do it if I wanted to setup default profiles it really started to bother me that I had to select a profile every time so I tried the method outlined above and it doesn’t work. Well it does if you start Firefox by running the script at /Applications/Firefox3.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox but that’s not what I foresee most people doing.

About two months ago now a friend of mine asked me to help him out by building him a website for a startup he was working with. Naturally I asked for some more information about the company and he told me they were going to do roadside barbeque and catering. For me, living in New York City, this seemed like a crazy idea but then I took a step back and considered where he was living (Central Pennsylvania) and thought this could work. Fortunately he wasn’t asking me for money or any kind of investment save some time and expertise.

What he needed was a web presence for this company and what I needed was a project I had heavy front-end involvement in but didn’t sit behind a login screen. There were not a lot of design assets for the company or website, basically a color scheme and a logo. The major feature he needed was a calendar to quickly illustrate where the company affiliated trucks were going to be. So I went with a fairly simple design which resembled a business flyer but provided plenty of space for content.

Since the calendar section was the big piece of dynamic content I spent the most time developing it and considering how the interaction would play out. Overall I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. The catering section of the site is, as yet, incomplete but since the company kicked off sales on the first of May they were a little anxious to have some kind of web presence even if they didn’t have the catering content ready yet. So as of this writing the gallery section has no images (but they just need to be dropped into a folder on the server to work) and the catering section is under construction, however, my first solo freelance project has gone live and I wanted to share.

Check out the Banty Brothers website

After finding ScribeFire I started looking around the vastness of the internets for an AIR application which did something similar. I didn’t find one.

What I did find was a post on Greg Wilson’s Ramblings which pointed me to an AIR app which integrated with Google Analytics to provide a pretty slick view of the tracking statistics provided by Google’s service.

The page for the GAS application doesn’t have an obvious download link because it is in the guise of the application’s version (which isn’t accurate anymore). If I were you I’d go direct to the suite download page and check it out.

It’s not that I have anything against using web interfaces but I like having individual applications for pages that are quite application like but I didn’t like my brief stint with application specific browsers.