We blogged how using Passenger made development easier, but being the Mac User Interface Junkies we are, we’d like to take it one step further.

This was a great opportunity to play with preference panes in RubyCocoa. Thanks to Jason Foreman, and his repository of templates, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time finding out how to initialize a prefPane bundle.

It turns out that creating basic features with a mediocre interface (the default stuff you get from Interface Builder) can be done fairly quickly. However, making it look and feel like a preference pane from the “OEM fruit company” is a different story. Who would have thought?! ;)

Thijs doing interface design with the latest available technologies. Can you spot the advanced z-index technique he used? Hint: Starts with a P.

Anyways, back to the introduction; after roughly 2 weeks we give you an OS X System Preferences pane that will configure Apache and set up a local hostname for running any Rails application using Phusion Passenger. Getting your Rails app up and running is now a matter of seconds.

Most users probably want to download the “stable” 1.0 release.

If you understand why stable has been quoted, you can track development and contribute on: github.com/alloy/passengerpane

Please report any bugs you may find at: fingertips.lighthouseapp.com/projects/13022

Note that Passenger preference pane requires OS X 10.5.2 (or at least 10.5.0 and install RubyCocoa 0.13.2 yourself) and Passenger 2.0.1.

In the wake of RubyEnRails 2008 comes a special Amsterdam.rb meeting with presentations at the TTY office. Confirmed presentations are:

• A quick overview of the Sellaband test framework
• A demo of the Ruby implementation of Quicktest: Rushtest
• Bye bye Ferret, long live ultrasphinx / sphinx (search engine plugin)
• Quick introduction of OSC and the Monome – Sam Aaron
• Short and Sweet; writing maintainable Ruby code – Manfred Stienstra

Hope to see you there!