If you’re at all interested in the often delicate interplay between design and typography you should check out Cameron Moll’s recent post.
For a closer look at Type City (which Moll refers to), check out the gallery at Veer. Also, if you have a free Veer account you can download Type City wallpaper here. I’ve been using the “Basilica” on my desktop and phone for a few weeks now.
Scoble’s video look into the new Rackspace facility in San Antonio is pretty sweet.
The following is a set of instructions for setting up your Grails development environment on OS X Leopard. This is probably not of much use to anyone else, but at least I’ll have it captured for myself.
You’ll need to grab the latest version of Groovy here (1.5.4 at the time of writing). Once you extract the zip file (Safari probably did that for you), move the extracted Groovy folder to the /usr/local folder. Here’s the command I used from a terminal window (you’ll probably be prompted for your password):
sudo mv groovy-1.5.4/ /usr/local/
You’ll need to make sure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set. You can add this to your .profile file if it’s not already there. I use TextMate as my editor of choice so I issued this command in the terminal window:
mate ~/.profile
Once you have that file open, add the following line:
export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
While editing your .profile file you also need to add the GROOVY_HOME environment variable:
export GROOVY_HOME=/usr/local/groovy-1.5.4
In your .profile file you also need to add $GROOVY_HOME/bin to your PATH. So the last line in your .profile file should look something like this:
export PATH=$GROOVY_HOME/bin:$PATH
At this point you need to execute your .profile file to pick up your latest changes. You can do that with the following command:
. ~/.profile
You should be able to test your Groovy install by running the following command:
groovy -version
It should report something like this:
Groovy Version: 1.5.4 JVM: 1.5.0_13-119
Download the latest version of Grails here (1.0.2 as of this writing). Once you extract the zip file (or tar.gz), move the extracted Grails folder to the /usr/local folder:
sudo mv grails-1.0.2/ /usr/local/
Edit your .profile file again adding the GRAILS_HOME environment variable:
export GRAILS_HOME=/usr/local/grails-1.0.2
Add $GRAILS_HOME/bin to your PATH. The last line of your .profile file should now look something like:
export PATH=$GROOVY_HOME/bin:$GRAILS_HOME/bin:$PATH
Execute your .profile file to pick up your changes:
. ~/.profile
At this point you should have a working Grails setup. You can test it out using the following command:
grails
If everything is working you should get a help message similar to the following:
Welcome to Grails 1.0.2 - http://grails.org/
Licensed under Apache Standard License 2.0
Grails home is set to: /usr/local/grails-1.0.2
No script name specified. Use 'grails help' for more info
The Grails installation notes mention the possibly of needing to issue a chmod +X on the grails executable, but I didn’t find this to be necessary. You’re mileage may vary. If you do run into errors you may want to check out the Grails install page. In that case, you may just want to bale on this blog altogether and go somewhere else.
You could stop at this point if you just wanted to kick it old school and use a text editor to write code, but we shall press on.
From inside IntelliJ you’ll need to grab the latest version of the JetGroovy plugin (1.5.15312). Once you install the plugin you’ll have to restart IntelliJ for the changes to take effect. You’ll need to tell the JetGroovy plugin where to find Groovy & Grails. Unfortunately the plugin seems unable to use the environment variables. To set these values Select “Groovy & Grails” under “Settings” and enter the proper path values.
At this point you should be able to create a new project within IntelliJ with a “Grails Application” module.
When you create the new project IntelliJ will run all of the necessary commands to properly setup your new Grails app. Once created you should be able to create a new “Grails Application” “Run Configuration” for your application and your off to the races.
My work here is done.
So the new designs for the British currency seem to be all the rage in the design community these days, and they are quite striking, check them out at the Royal Mint.
For an amusing comparison between the new UK currency and the recently released $5 dollar bill, check out typography.com.
On the issue of money, it’s fascinating that coins have never really taken off here in the States, but in the UK they’re huge. If you travel to the UK then you’ll know what I mean simply by the weight, and musical qualities of your pockets.
I finally got around to upgrading to the latest version of WordPress (2.5) tonight. It was pretty painless and well worth it. The folks at Happy Cog redesigned the admin interface and it’s much improved. After the upgrade I’m feeling like I need to go through and clean out a bunch of crap (themes & plugins) that DreamHost laid down during the initial install and setup. Anyway, if you’re a WordPress user you should check it out.