Integration with MySQL is poor. It won't work with the standard MySQL that comes with Snow Leopard Server, because it has a local interface at /var/mysql/mysql.sock, but Tcal insists it be at /tmp/mysql.sock.

So I fixed that with a hard link, but then Tcal can't find the user "@localhost," which is not a proper user name. The documentation says to make a user called "Admin" with NO PASSWORD -- THIS IS A NO-NO!

Typically, a MySQL application would have a config file somewhere that has the server, user, password, and database listed, but these are apparently hard-compiled into Tcal -- yuk! (After a lot of digging, I used the "strings" utility to find '/tmp/mysql.sock hard-wired into TcalServer.app/Contents/MacOS/Externals/database_drivers/dbmysql.bundle/Contents/MacOS/dbmysql -- double-yuk!)

I had high hopes that this would be a nice way of integrating calendar info into other MySQL apps, as the developer's website claims. But there seems to be no documentation for doing so.

Finally, US$110 seems very steep for something so inflexible. Perhaps that comes with a lot of hand-holding, but that's a lot of money for me to take a risk that support will be a lot better than the documentation.

Having spent several hours trying to get this to work on my stock MacOS X Snow Leopard Server, I'm still looking for a good MySQL calendar app.

This is an outstanding and versatile tool. It is dead simple to do simple things, but I dinged it a bit for "Ease of Use" for doing some complicated things.

Case in point: I use it to randomly access my database of over 7,000 quotes, stored in MySQL. It took a bit of sleuthing, guessing, and contact with the developer (who was VERY supportive) to get it to work. Here's how it went:

I have a signature like this:

{script:nopre:"/Users/jan/bin/randquote"}

The script that fires up is this:


#!/bin/bash
echo -n `/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql --user=**** --password=**** --host **** --database=**** --raw --silent --batch < < -EnDoFcOmMaNd
SELECT
CONCAT(Quote, " -- ", AuthorFirst, " ", AuthorLast)
FROM Quotes
WHERE ${*:-UseInEmail = 'yes'}
ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1;
EnDoFcOmMaNd`

(The parameters marked "****" are site-specific.)

What I would REALLY like would be a way to pass a parameter into the script, so I could pick a random signature from among those with a particular keyword, for example.

The script thing sometimes times out or says NULL, but overall, this is a wonderful free utility and I highly recommend it to both novices and graybeard UNIX script junkies.

I have been using this off and on for several years

It is great for "standard" stuff like INT and VARCHAR, but BEWARE using it for BLOB and TEXT types!

I used it to add some images to a database in BLOB format. It hex-encoded the data in the BLOB field for some strange reason, which itself wasn't any great loss, but what makes it totally unacceptable is that it also hex-encoded all the TEXT fields in the same record! This is BAD NEWS!

Luckily, I discovered this before it went very far, and I found a Service that translated hex-encoded text back to ASCII, and fixed the fields that CocoaMySQL broke.

For those who want a freeware MySQL client that will not corrupt TEXT and BLOB fields, I recomment YourSQL, which has served me well in such an application.

WARNING! Cosmopod 4.4.1 breaks Safari 5.0, such than no website will load.

Remove /Library/InputManagers/CosmoPod, and Safari 5.0 works fine.

I sent CocoaMug Software a note to that effect, and they replied within five minutes that an update was on the way...