Anvil - a Mac app for Pow | Hacker News Reader

Anvil - a Mac app for Pow

anvilformac.com

136 pointselliottkember71 comments

Your "Install Pow" doesn't work with a drive name which has spaces. eg. /bin/sh /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Downloads/Anvil.app/Contents/Resources/InstallPow.sh; exit

needs to escape the space. App itself looks polished, checking it out now!

Rats. Thanks for the report - I'll push a new version shortly. I sure hope nobody minds all the updates. (Edit: fixed!)

I for one think it's great you're doing updates quickly and often as things come up that warrant pushing updates in the first place. Keep up the good work. This looks like a nifty little tool!

Wow, that is the sort of bug that leads to installers accidentally wiping hard drives.

How so? I'm honestly curious.

https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/issue...

Thx. I think Apple had a famous one too.

Note that .dev is one of the new TLD's being handed out[1]. I also used .dev as my local environment and switched them all over to .local a while ago.

.local[2] was specifically set aside just for this task, and is recognized as a local address by the major browsers (instead of .dev, which often results in a search hit).

[1] http://www.newgtldsite.com/dot-dev-tld-domain-name-extension...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local

Edit: just noticed that the .dev hostnames come from Pow, the underlying server. probably not a good idea.

Where did the .dev fad come from? Why is the web being taken over by folks who don't try to begin to understand how the internet works?

This looks really nice.

I have 67 apps symlinked into ~/.pow, but only the top 29 are shown on my laptop screen, and scrolling sadly doesn't work.

Any chance of adding "Open in $EDITOR" to the context menu? And .xip.io URLs?

More than 29 apps is Doing It Wrong.

Just kidding! I'll add this to the to-do list.

I love the app already :D

Little bits of feedback:

* The Anvil icon on the menu bar doesn't show itself as being active when I click it.

* When I click on the + to add a new app, make anvil lose focus to the file dialog.

* The "About Anvil" dialog insists on hiding behind all other windows.

The first point is a menu bar app thing. Seems weird to activate it for a popover type window. The other two are fixed in the latest update. Thanks for the feedback! <3

We need something like this for vagrant.

That is exactly what I thought as well.

wouldn't that be nice.

Be sure to checkout Vagrant Hostmaster, which will automatically add your VM's host name and aliases to your /etc/hosts!

I'm very glad you didn't decide to go the Mac App Store route -- as sad as it sounds, MAS has incredible friction compared to an old fashioned zip

Our hands were tied. Installing 3rd party code, using the ~/.pow/ directory, and running on port 80 are all things that are frowned-upon. So it's easier to make it free!

I'm curious as to whether you can submit an app to the MAS which integrates with non-MAS apps? Any idea whether Apple allows that?

e.g. so you could offload any frowned-upon functionality into external apps/services, and maybe promote or offer automated download & install functionality within your own app...

> 2.16 Apps that download or install additional code or resources to add functionality or change their primary purpose will be rejected

I've wondered how certain programs get around these restrictions. I use Boom[1] on my ridiculously quiet laptop. The program you download from MAS is more or less a shell. It guides you to download and install the actual sound drivers that do all the work.

[1]: http://www.globaldelight.com/boom/

What does the on/off slider do? Another handy tool for managing Pow is the ruby gem "powder". It's command line only however.

The on/off slider turns Pow on and off. We love powder too!

Why does the on/off functionality look like a slider when it functions like a button?

I don't think it does. It mimics the look of the iOS "switches" which are universally used for on/off commands

Because iOS brain damaged the industry.

What is the functional difference between a slider and a button?

Wow this is nicely done. I added a homebrew cask for it so it can be installed via `brew cask install anvil`. https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/commit/aff3777759dfc...

Left you a message there, but just in case you miss it - Very cool! Would you mind linking to http://anvilformac.com/download so this automatically downloads the latest version?

Never heard of Pow before, but on inspection it looks very interesting and could save a bunch of time.

Anyone know if there's any way to make it work with python (WSGI or similar) services? It's kinda hard to search 'pow' without ending up at various exponentiation functions :/

Looks like it should be possible: http://pow.cx/manual.html#section_2.1.4

I totally missed that, thanks. Tested and working now.

Does anyone know why pow uses the .dev tld rather than .test? .test is reserved for local testing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.test

I was also confused at the choice of default. Fortunately you can update your config to support any TLD:

http://pow.cx/manual#section_3.1

Really, the whole manual is published in engraved-in-stone visual style? That is enough to convince me not to let this software run on my machine, especially not with admin privileges.

Why would does that convince you that this software shouldn't have admin privileges on your machine? It seems awfully arbitrary to me.

I've tried the app for only 5 minutes and I love it already - it's a much more elegant solution than having to use "jekyll --server -auto" and localhost:4000. The thing that bugs me though is that the list of websites doesn't expand beyond three sites- you have to scroll to see the fourth site. Shouldn't the list dialog expand to fit all the sites?

How did you get Jekyll working with pow/anvil? Just symlink _site to a public dir? I get a 404 when trying to use pow/anvil on jekyll sites.

Well, it took me 15 minutes to figure out the cause of 404 error.

If you DON'T have index.html in your root folder it will return this error, python's SimpleHTTPServer module does much better job and gives you list of your folders.

Something like this with Django (i.e run the runserver command would be tight).

Any reason why the Pow installer turns off my Wi-Fi? Also I get the following error from the installer: "!!! Couldn't resolve configured domains (dev)"

Novel idea. Too bad it doesn't work :/

I already have Pow installed but its asking me to install again. Will it conflict w/ my existing install and configuration if I reinstall Pow through Anvil?

Love it.

It really is a simple, elegant way to handle pow - I would pay for this happily.

Put up a donate link via Stripe and I will :)

We're in the UK so it might have to be PayPal for now :( but we might do that at some point once we've fixed all the bugs!

I really like the simple UI to this. Great work! Just curious what the future plans of this project are. Any plans of open sourcing it?

Very nice app. It would be nice if you could optionally view the files in a directory when no index file is provided.

Pow is great - except when you need to fall back on debugging multiple apps. Even with powder it's flaky at best.

Love the website design also. The site design is simple but gives you all the info you need to make a decision.

Nice little app. Would be handy to be able to edit the generated .dev URL to be different from the folder.

Thats not really how Pow[1] works. It's weird that there isn't any mention of Pow on that page if that's what it's using in the backend. I didn't download it since I'm not on 10.7, maybe it mentions it later.

I wrote something similar (https://github.com/rktjmp/ker-pow) a while ago but never considered using it to actually make new ~/.pow/ links, I might add that in. Anvil is probably much more useful!

[1] http://pow.cx

> Thats not really how Pow[1] works.

I think you will find that is _exactly_ how Pow works. Because you're just creating a symlink (ln -s source_name link_name) you can name it whatever you want. (i.e. ln -s ~/sites/my_full_url.com.au ~/.pow/blog)

Whoops, yeah – you're 100% correct. Not sure what I was actually thinking...

You can - right-click on the row to edit the name, as well as open in Finder or Terminal.

Maybe just make it so double clicking a site lets you rename it?

Right-click -> rename.

Doesn't work for me on Macbook Air with Ctrl + Click

Thank you, this is really great. I love simple little things like this that just make life better.

I think your webpage should tell the visitor what Pow is, and/or what Anvil is a front end to.

You should open source it :) I'd love to modify it to work with PHP by default.

Pow is open-source (pow.cx) - feel free to try adding PHP to it. In my experience, PHP is far more complicated due to php.ini configurations and installation. Rack lends itself a bit better to this kind of hosting.

Suggestions on getting the favicon to show up?

If it's a static site, put the favicon in the root directory. We're planning a fix that finds favicons no matter where they are. Sorry!

Oh-e It's just works. Perfect. Thank you

pretty cool app - seems to work really well. Thanks Anvil!

Thank you!

Wait, what? So instead of typing file:///home/username/site/index.html this program lets you type http://site.dev? If there was ever undeniable proof that Mac users are clinically retarded...

Go learn about Cross-domain origin policies and then come back.

Subdomains. Rails apps. Multiple apps running at the same time together. There are a few reasons this is useful. Please be more constructive with your feedback.

What is a Rack app?

http://rack.github.com/ - basically a Rails adapter for a webserver.

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