Oct 21, 2012
Working With Drafts in Octopress —
Having recently moved to an Octopress blog I’ve been revelling in the geekery of managing my posts from the command line. I was previously using MarsEdit to manage my posting to Tumblr, but that’s not as viable an option any more. This is a shame because I like MarsEdit and I especially liked the ability to work with local draft posts, something that Octopress (and the underlying Jekyll framework) does not natively provide.…
Oct 19, 2012
Tweetbot for Mac Pricing —
After what seemed like an agonising wait for the Mac App Store review period to complete Tweetbot for Mac has now been released. The app went through a long (and strangely quite public1) alpha testing period and as a result there is very little to surprise the user in the finished product. Except that is, the price.
The sale price of $20 has ruffled a few feathers amongst the potential customers for Tweetbot.…
Oct 15, 2012
The Magazine is Not the Experiment —
The Mac and iOS community got in all of a tizzy late last week following the announcement of Marco Arment’s latest project - The Magazine, a foray into the world of publishing through the channel of the iOS Newsstand application. The basic premise is simple: a monthly subscription of $1.99 delivers you two issues per month direct to your iOS device. Each issue contains 4 editorials produced by a variety of writers.…
Aug 31, 2012
Maximising Bang Per Token —
The brouhaha over third-party Twitter clients continues with the news of the release of a beta version of Tweetbot for Mac. Just 4 days ago the alpha version was withdrawn with Tapbots citing as a reason the “finite limit on the number of user tokens we can get for Tweetbot for Mac”.
This was a fair move by the developers - any Mac user could download the alpha, sign in and obtain a limited Tweetbot for Mac token.…
Aug 30, 2012
Full Screen Mode is Not For You —
During a recent episode of Hypercritical, host John Siracusa mentioned that he had received feedback from readers of his OS X Mountain Lion review commenting about the failings of full screen mode in Mountain Lion (and previously in Lion), particularly with respect to multiple monitor support.
I see where these comments have come from and have sympathy. When I first installed Lion I was eager to get stuck into this new world of full screen apps.…
Aug 28, 2012
SublimeLinter - an Enabler for Lazy Programming Techniques —
Recently I’ve been experimenting with text-editor-du-jour Sublime Text 2 in parallel with coming late to the Rails party. Sublime Text 2 has a great plugin ecosystem that seems to be growing by the day and one plugin (or package in ST2 parlance) that I find indispensible is SublimeLinter.
As a developer I’ve always written code in an iterative fashion - write a couple of lines, compile, edit those lines to fix the bugs, compile, write a few more lines, and so on.…
Aug 14, 2012
Maplin 500Mb/s Powerline Adapters - A Rambling Review —
I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. I have a beautiful home of timberframe construction where every internal wall is a stud wall. What this really means is that every wall is a candidate for being stuffed full of cables. My biggest home-improvement desire is to get every room wired with Gigabit Ethernet, but if possible I’d like to get every type of cable under the sun in there.…
Aug 11, 2012
Why App.net? —
App.net is a hot topic of conversation at the minute in the intersection between the Twitter and Apple worlds that I like to inhabit1. Just over a month ago, Dalton Caldwell wrote a blog post entitled “What Twitter Could Have Been”. While this initial post could be viewed as a bit of a complaint or a moan, it was also something of a catalyst. He soon followed up with a post that may go down in Internet history: “Announcing an Audacious Proposal”.…
Aug 8, 2012
Q. When is Apple news not actually news? —
A. When you report old “news” as though it just “finally” happened.
Mike Schramm at TUAW posted the following last night:
Apple has finished smoothing out its Xcode releases with version 4.4.1, which finally brings Xcode out as a standalone app.
For some bizarre reason, Mike seems to have completely missed the Xcode 4.3 release that first introduced the concept of a standalone Xcode. (He also missed the 4.…
Aug 6, 2012
The (Mountain) Lion And The Mouse —
Mountain Lion has been running really well on almost all the machines I’ve installed it to, with just one exception - my (employer’s) 17" MacBook Pro. This is unfortunate, as it’s the machine that I spend the most time on - if it’s not running smoothly I feel the “pain” all day, every day.
Specifically I was experiencing severe cursor lag when using the mouse (or trackpad) on an intermittent basis.…