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Just got done playing around with Plasq’s Comic Life app for OSX. Basically it allows you to create great-looking comic book pages with your pictures. It’s as easy to use as Apple’s iLife apps - drag-and-drop images into the pages, drag text bubbles, integrated with iPhoto, etc. Comic Life comes with several pre-built templates to have you creating pages in seconds, à la Apple’s own Pages. Here’s a sample page I created in literally 10 minutes using pictures from last summer’s trip to the Tail of the Dragon at Deal’s Gap, NC.

This is actually a rather straight-forward install on OS X. Basically just download the source and compile. Yes, there is a binary installer available and Apple even included Apache 1.3 with the OS. However, if you’re planning to get Apache, PHP, SSL, Tomcat and JK2 all working together as I have, compiling from source actually saves a lot of headaches. I have included step-by-step directions and hints for my own reference. If someone else finds this useful, even better.

1. Download the latest version of the Apache HTTP Server here. I used version 2.0.52 at the time of writing.
2. Extract the archive to a folder. I like to store my source code in /usr/local/src for no paricular reason.

   cd /usr/local
   mkdir src
   cd src
   tar xjvf /path/to/httpd-2.0.52.tar.bz2
   

3. Change to the newly created Apache source folder and compile the source. I am including SSL support and mod_rewrite. By using the –prefix=/usr/local/apache2 argument, I am forcing all of the Apache components to be installed in that folder. This makes maintenance easier since everything is in one place and not scattered about. This will also leave OS X’s default install of Apache 1.3 alone in case you ever want to revert back to it.

   cd httpd-2.0.52/
   ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --enable-ssl --enable-auth-digest
    --enable-rewrite --enable-dav --enable-dav-fs
   make
   sudo make install

   Note: You only need the ‘–enable-dav’ and ‘–enable-dav-fs’ if you plan to use WebDAV. If you don’t know what that is, you’re probably safe to leave it out.

4. Apache is now installed. We just need to change some settings in the configuration files and we’re set.

   cd /usr/local/apache2/
   sudo vi conf/httpd.conf

   We need to add two lines near the beginning of this file to tell Apache what user/group to run under. I added them just above the “ServerRoot” section, although anywhere will work.

   User www
   Group www

   At the minimum, change the ServerName line to reflect your domain name and make sure DocumentRoot is pointing to where you keep your web pages. To allow users to place their home pages in OS X’s default Sites folder, change the UserDir line to read:

   UserDir Sites

   Save the changes and quit the editor.

5. Make sure that the default OSX Apache installation is not running. To do this, open the Sharing System Preference and make sure ‘Personal Web Sharing’ is unchecked. Also, if you’re using OSX’s built-in firewall function, you must create rules for HTTP (port 80) and HTTPS (port 443).
6. Start Apache.

   /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start

   Try to connect to http://localhost in your web browser. If you see your web page, you are all set. If not, check the error log to see if it gives clues to what is wrong.

   tail /usr/local/apache2/logs/error_log

Please leave a comment if you found this useful or discovered any errors or omissions so I can improve this write-up for others.