

Anvil - a Mac app for Pow - elliottkember
http://anvilformac.com

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dekz
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!

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

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TheGateKeeper
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!

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nikcub
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...](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.

~~~
Evbn
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?

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elektronaut
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?

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elliottkember
More than 29 apps is Doing It Wrong.

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

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sudhirj
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.

~~~
elliottkember
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

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Axsuul
We need something like this for vagrant.

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dorian-graph
That is exactly what I thought as well.

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b2rock
wouldn't that be nice.

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niggler
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

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elliottkember
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!

~~~
ryantownsend
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...

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

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kurige
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/>

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

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

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

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

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phinze
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...](https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-
cask/commit/aff3777759dfced2b58d0e14c6f1a071f48c5648)

~~~
elliottkember
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?

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shabble
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 :/

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

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

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

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rehashed
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>

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Evbn
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.

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

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zenstealth
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?

~~~
imagetic
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.

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kodisha
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.

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

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btully
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 :/

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bennyfreshness
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?

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kposehn
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 :)

~~~
elliottkember
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!

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marcomonteiro
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?

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

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

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

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

~~~
rktjmp
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>

~~~
davidlumley
> 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)

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

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

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

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

~~~
elliottkember
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.

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FootballMuse
Suggestions on getting the favicon to show up?

~~~
elliottkember
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!

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

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francov88
pretty cool app - seems to work really well. Thanks Anvil!

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instakill
Thank you!

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D3
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...

~~~
elliottkember
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.

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Evbn
What is a Rack app?

~~~
iSnow
<http://rack.github.com/> \- basically a Rails adapter for a webserver.

