SMART Notebook 11.4 on Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite requires Ruby 1.8

I upgraded my Mac to OS X 10.10 Yosemite and SMART Notebook 11.4 started to crash upon opening it.  SMART doesn't provide a patch or any information on why that is, except that you'd basically need to buy a newer version of Notebook (which I wasn't about to do).

So with some investigation it turns out SMART Notebook 11.4 requires Ruby 1.8 to work.  Except installing Ruby 1.8 from, e.g., Homebrew doesn't work.  I guess SMART had statically linked Notebook 11.4 against the particular Ruby library that was distributed by Apple.

A bit of research online turns up a post describing the same problem and the solution: copy Ruby 1.8 from a pre-Yosemite Mac over to Yosemite in the same directory.

The directory is /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/.

Someone even made an installer and posted a link in the comments in that post, although I can't say whether you should trust using that installer...  Not feeling comfortable using that installer, I dug up an older Mac and zipped up the 1.8 folder from the above directory and copied it over to my Yosemite machine.

Leave a comment here or message me if you want a zipped copy of the Ruby 1.8 folder.  Or else if you feel comfortable with using that unvetted installer, then go download it from that comment.

Problems with this fix

Note that this method of making SMART Notebook 11.4 work will make the program less stable.  I've had crashes from time to time.  It also makes the toolbar unusable, and in fact, it won't even show up on the screen!  So get used to picking tools the long way via the menubar instead.

I do wish there was a better software solution to what I'll call the "Projector Transparency Roll - Writable (50 feet)".

Spotlight indexing gone wild on Mac OS X because of faulty SMART Notebook mdimporter

For various reasons, my Mac had to completely redo its Spotlight index.  But it was taking far longer than I expected, chewing up a lot of hard disk bandwidth (and keeping my laptop fan on all night).  That's not good.

I investigate with Activity Monitor and find that mdworker32 is doing a lot of work.  That's the program that, in the background, builds up the Spotlight index so you could search for file names and contents.  It relies on various Spotlight plugins (mdimporter) that lets third-party programs define how its own files is to be indexed by the whole Spotlight system.

Opening up the Console program lets me see all the log files that's been generated lately, including a lot of mdworker32 crash logs.  Each of which finger the com.smarttech.notebook.mdimporter plugin as the crashing culprit.  It even helpfully identified its location: /Applications/SMART Technologies/Notebook.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/SMART Notebook.mdimporter.

Completely removing the /Applications/SMART Technologies/Notebook.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight folder fixed the problem.

It turns out that whenever Spotlight indexing encountered a SMART Notebook file, it tried to use the SMART Notebook.mdimporter plugin, which promptly crashed, triggering mdworker32 to relaunch to keep indexing.  Of course, the SMART Notebook.mdimporter plugin kept crashing mdworker32, so Spotlight indexing was taking forever and getting nowhere fast.

This fix does mean that Spotlight can't do a content-based search into SMART Notebook files.  Of course, it still couldn't even without the fix given that the mdimporter pluging wasn't working to begin with.  Maybe my SMART Notebook is old; it's version 11.0.811.1.

Stop SMART Board Tools from starting on Login on Mac OS X

I don't use the SMART Board that often, so I don't like having the Board Tools program (that's the vertical side bar that floats on top of everything after you have SMART Board programs installed) starting up every single time I log in to my computer (Mac OS X).

The critical information I found from Tyler Grusendorf's blog post on the same issue, but I don't think it's necessary to do all the steps he proposes.  Just delete the com.smarttech.boardtools.plist file from the /Library/LaunchAgents folder and that's it.  It worked for me.  :)