I had a terrible weekend. My faithful MacBook Pro of two years decided it was finally time to remind me how it feels to be a Vista user. I have alot of development environments, tools, development apps, debuggers and so forth on my main user profile on my Mac running Leopard 10.5.6.
I can only remember one proper crash that closely reseambled a BSOD for OSX, much to the delight of the Windows users in the office.
I was preparing myself in between tweets to go and smash out a few mods to Wordpress and work on some side projects when my Dreamweaver decided to no load. I had the nice little bouncing icon, the little blue-LED-like dot and then nothing. No splash box. No loading plugins and libraries. Nothing.
So I gave up and went and fired up Smultron. Not a big deal.
Meanwhile, the last Firefox update I installed, had a little funny bug that I didn’t worry about too much - no scroll bar down the right hand side. To overcome this, i used my trusty scroll wheel on the mouse. But I figured I had put up with it enough and decided it was time to unistall it all and start fresh, especially since I was suffering from severe plugin bloating of my firefox.
So I downloaded the version on the main page, not one of the betas or nightly builds and fired it up. No probs, a nice shiny clean Firefox. My next task was to immediately put Firebug on, a plugin no web developer can live without. And then it happened.
download error -228
After a few Google searches, there wasn’t too much helpful information about the error, even from Firefox’s support page.
I bit the bullet and rang Adobe’s Tech Support, and they weren’t that helpful. However they gave me the inspiration to help me solve the problem. They suggested that I create a fresh user profile on my Mac and see if Dreamweaver worked under that. And indeed, it did work. But I couldn’t have a separate profile just for my Dreamweaver, it wasn’t practical. Adobe didn’t have a solution for me either.
But it got me thinking and this is what I came up with.
The Solution to my Dreamweaver and Firefox Bugs
I figured after two years of development and adding and deleting of apps, there would be a bit of rubbish in my user account. Deleting the account and rebuilding was definitely not an option. So I needed to give my User account in OSX a clean up.
And after a few searches, I found the blog post that saved my life:
How to Repair User Permissions
By running the command suggested in the Terminal, letting it do its thing for a couple of minutes, I came back and fired up my two problem apps.
And low and behold it worked! Both Dreamweaver and Firefox!
So the conclusion for this post: If any of your Apps on your Mac are playing up or doing something funny, the first port of call is definitely to clean up your user profile account.
Now I’m off to finish my dev work!
