Now, that I’m starting to move all my personal files from a PC to my new Mac, I learned that I need a way to replace a Microsoft Access database I use all the time.  It’s a simple application.  It just keeps track of what I’m spending on utilities and the usage readings.  I have some reports that will show how the cost and usage varies over the years.

Since, I’m super cheap, I decided not to purchase File Maker Pro, which is a great replacement.  I’m going to write my own application in Cocoa.

I found a decent tutorial for learning Cocoa.   http://cocoadevcentral.com/d/learn_cocoa/

The tutorial was easy to follow, but when it came time to compile and run, it failed with the following error message

error: can’t exec ‘/Developer/Library/Xcode/Plug-ins/CoreBuildTasks.xcplugin/Contents/Resources/copystrings’ (No such file or directory)

I found an interesting article that help me fix the problem. Fix

If you run the copystrings command in Terminal, you will find that it’s looking for ruby in /usr/bin/ruby.  However, since MacPorts was installed, Ruby is in another location /opt/local/bin/ruby.

To fix the problem, run the following code

sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby

They mention that this is not an ideal fix, but worked for me, and since I’m new to Mac OS programming, I’ll take what I can get.