Month: November 2009

While re-loading the OS and apps on my iMac at work, I ran into major issues whilst updating MS Office 2008.  When running the first update, Office 2008 SP1 (12.1.0) I had no problems, however none of the other updates would run.  I kept getting the error “You cannot install Office 2008 Updates on this volume. A version of the software required to install this update was not found on this volume.”

At first I thought that this might be due to some permissions shenanigans revolving around my AD/OD setup, since the logged in user was not a local admin, but had been granted administrator privileges through a nested group trick.

After more searching I ran across a post on the forums MacRumors.com pointing out problems when running updates on an Office 2008 install that had been altered by using Monolingual or XSlimmer.

Both of these programs were developed to slim down the sizes of binary applications on OS X.  Monolingual strips the “additional languages” from OS X programs and operating system files, while XSlimmer is designed to remove both the extra language information and the unused binary code in a fat binary.  I have never used either of these programs, since I was not concerned about the amount of disk space they utilize.

After more searching, I ran across a post in the Entourage Help Pages discussing troubleshooting Office 2008 installations.  While this page also mentioned issues with installations being altered by Monolingual and XSlimmer, it also pointed out an issue with a workaround created to handle a bug in how Safari deals with the docx file extension.  While the automator workflow mentioned does not appear to actually affect anything other than the names of files, it did jog my memory about something else Safari related that occured when installing Adobe CS 4 earlier the same day.

While installing CS 4 and the available updates, I was prompted to not only quit Safari, but also to quit XMarks for Safari.  For those that don’t know, XMarks is a great service for synchronizing your browser bookmarks between multiple machines, platforms, and browsers.

On a hunch I quit XMarks for Safari, as well as the browser itself.  No dice, I still got the error.  Knowing how easy it would be to reinstall the helper application, I uninstalled XMarks.  Eureka!  The Office updaters now ran without a hitch.  So, if you are having this problem, try deactivating or removing anything plugins that effect the default nature of Safari.

Apple, Mac OS X, Software

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Up to this point most of the client customization I have talked about for Adobe Contribute involved changes that affected only the user interface. Outside of the custom plugin, none of them had any real effect on the usefulness of the client itself.

This customization is different, and like the addition of the Dublin Core plugin, it can have usefulness even if you are only using the Contribute client itself without the need to deploy it to multiple users in any enterprise situation.

When you create a table in Contribute, you can always setup the style of the table in the normal way by selecting the various rows, columns and cells and changing the backgrounds, font colors, etc. However, this process can be quite tedious when styling a large table, so in order to make this process easier Contribute has a Format Table feature that allows you to apply a pre-set or customized style to the entire table. This dramatically speeds the process up, but if you continually apply the same custom style to tables on your site you might like to add this to the list of pre-set table formats.

In order to do this you need to edit the file tableFormats.js. This file contains the individual table formats listed in the Format Table dialog and can be found here:

Mac – /Applications/Adobe Contribute CS3/Configuration/Commands

Win – C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Contribute CS3\Configuration\Commands

There are two main sections of formats defined in this file:

• Alternating Rows – table formats where each row has a different background color; may also have a different color for the header row.
• Non-alternating Rows – table formats where each row has the same background color; may also have a different color for the header row.

Instructions for the creation of new formats are contained as comments in the javascript file, however there are a few things that are not mentioned:

1. You should define a new variable in the Localized Globals section for you new table format; this is used in the Formats array when building the dialog box.
2. The values for topRowTextStyle and topRowColor control the look of the header row. If you set these to the null values then this row will match the look set for the variables firstRowColor and will be assigned no special text attributes.
3. While the supplied formats only show the rowLimit variable set to either 0, 1, or 2 to indicate the number of rows set to each color on an alternating row design, you can actually use larger numbers if desired.

As an example, here is the format used for the table on the Valdosta State University Calendars page:
//VSU Colors Formats[++i] = new Array(); Formats[i].name=alt_vsu; Formats[i].firstRowColor="#CCCCCC"; Formats[i].secondRowColor="#FFFFFF"; Formats[i].topRowTextStyle=BOLD; Formats[i].topRowAlign="center"; Formats[i].topRowColor="#C80F0A"; Formats[i].topRowTextColor="#FFFFFF"; Formats[i].leftColTextStyle=BOLD; Formats[i].leftColAlign=""; Formats[i].border="2"; Formats[i].rowLimit="1";

Adobe Contribute, Software

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In my last post about customizing the Contribute Client I talked about customizing the Welcome Page.

Well, if you recall, I mentioned that the Welcome Page is built on the fly from a Dreamweaver template. More than just this one page is built this way. Each of the special, dynamic pages are built in this fashion. Below I will list the file locations for the various dynamic pages that you can alter.

Draft Console

Mac – /Applications/Adobe Contribute CS3/Configuration/Content/DraftConsole

Win – C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Contribute CS3\Configuration\Content\DraftConsole

Placeholder

Mac – /Applications/Adobe Contribute CS3/Configuration/Content/Placeholder

Win – C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Contribute CS3\Configuration\Content\Placeholder

External Edit

Mac – /Applications/Adobe Contribute CS3/Configuration/Content/ExtEdit

Win – C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Contribute CS3\Configuration\Content\ExtEdit

Adobe Contribute, Software

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In this article I will briefly discuss the customization of the Task Panel.

On the Welcome Page, in the bottom left is a nice section entitled How Do I… that contains handy information on how to accomplish a whole slew of tasks in Contribute.

What I found during my research into customizing the client is that this section of the page is controlled by the contents on an XML file. Each of the categories and their items can be changed to suit the needs of your deployment and your users.

The files for the Task Panel are located here:

Mac – /Applications/Adobe Contribute CS3/Configuration/Content/Tasks

Win – C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Contribute CS3\Configuration\Content\Tasks

The XML and CSS files controlling the Task Panel and it’s contents are

• Tasks.css
• Tasks.xml
• TasksLayout.xml

The TasksLayout.xml file contains the table structure definitions of the Task Panel, since like many other components of the Contribute client, this section is controlled and populated using HTML.

The Tasks.xml file contains the actual text of the category structure. Each category is defined with a unique ID number and each task is defined within that category node along with an ID number and associated HTML file containing the content of the task. Each of the ID numbers are sequential.

The HTML files are named sequentially by default, but this doesn’t appear to be necessary in order to make everything work properly.

If any of your custom tasks have images associated with them, they need to be placed in the images directory so that they will be found. The images need to be referenced with the source relative to the location of the associated task HTML file.

Adobe Contribute, Software

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