As I wrote then:

“…when you’re archiving older data, it’s much more useful for the ZIP file date to reflect the date of its contents, since a few years from now you probably won’t care when you compressed the stuff, but rather how old the files inside are.”

With Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, this same workflow can be set up to run as a service, accessible from the context menu in any Finder window. The process is essentially the same as described in the original post, with the following adjustments:

To create the workflow,

1. Open /Applications/Automator.app, select the Service template and click Choose.
2. At the top of the workflow area on the right side of the window, change the first list option to files or folders.
3. From the Finder library, drag the Create Archive action to the workflow area. In the action settings, specify the default name and location for the archive file. (I prefer the same name & folder as the input, but you can set the Options to prompt for this information when the workflow runs.)
4. From the Automator library, add the Run Shell Script action. Leave the Shell set to /bin/bash, set Pass input to as arguments, and replace the default script in the text box with zip -o "$@".

Save the workflow as a service, and you can run it on files & folders in the Finder by Control-clicking and choosing your new command from the Services submenu in the shortcut menu.

Note: To create a service that will set the date for existing ZIP files, skip Step 3 above.

This connection method also has other advantages, as the VMware Fusion Release Notes explain:

“VMware Fusion’s default network connection type for new virtual machines is NAT, which will prevent the spread of viruses over the network into the virtual machine, and will only expose the virtual machine to external viruses through browser security flaws when you browse the Internet.”

The idea of sharing VPN connections with Windows applications via Parallels is touted as a VPN Tracker feature and explained in detail in a how-to PDF, but it works equally well with VMware Fusion.

The key is setting the network adaptor to shared networking (NAT) as opposed to the bridged or host-only options shown in the VMware settings screenshot below.

With this approach, network traffic from your virtual machine is routed through the existing VPN connection on the host Mac, so there’s no need to install a separate VPN client application on the guest PC.

But if you also run Windows on your Mac via Boot Camp, you can set up a single installation of the Open Toolkit on your Windows partition and use it to generate output from either operating system environment.

Essentially, you boot into Windows (via VMware, Parallels, or directly) and set up the toolkit there as usual.

Once you have the toolkit running under Windows, create a copy of the Ant build file for your project, adjust the paths for access from Mac OS X and save it under a new name in the DITA-OT directory on your Windows partition. (You’ll call this file later from the Terminal to build your project output on the Mac.)

Back on Mac OS, set up the environment variables required by the toolkit.

You can do this by editing the .bash_profile file in your home directory, or if you don’t like editing hidden UNIX files by hand, you can use freeware such as RCEnvironment or SSHKeychain, which provide a simple dialog that allows you to define environment variables like in Windows.

(In the background, both tools simply write to the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file. SSHKeychain also serves as a nice Mac equivalent to PuTTY, but that’s another story…)

The key here is to use the absolute path to the toolkit installation on the Boot Camp partition. For example, if your Windows partition is named BOOTCAMP and the toolkit lives there at C:\DITA-OT1.4.1, you might set the DITA_HOME variable like this:

DITA_HOME=/Volumes/BOOTCAMP/DITA-OT1.4.1  

You can then define the other variables relative to the toolkit directory with entries like this:

ANT_HOME=$DITA_DIR/tools/ant

Note: If you use either of the aforementioned tools to edit ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist, you’ll need to use the full paths for the remaining variables, as $VARIABLE values are not expanded when this file is read.

Once the variables are all set, you’ll need to log in to OS X again to activate them.

Then with a command like this, you can build output from the Terminal using the Mac version of the build file you edited above:

ant -f your-mac-build-file.xml html 

To build CHM output, switch to Boot Camp, run startcmd.bat in the DITA-OT directory, and enter something like this on the command line:

ant -f your-windows-build-file.xml chm

If both your build files are set to share an output folder on your Mac, your files will land in the same place, no matter which operating system you build them on.