Software for your Mac

You know the drill. A new version of some popular piece of software is released, and no matter how good it is reactions are going to be mixed. Somehow, somewhere out there will be at least one person who absolutely hates the new version for the tiniest and/or most ridiculous reason – and insists that he shares his feelings with everyone else.

Today that person is me, and this is the story of why I hate Xcode 4.

As you know, Apple recently released the latest and greatest version of its software development app – Xcode. Being a bit of an Apple software developer, I dutifully installed it and prepared myself to be amazed. No such luck. You see, I happen to use Xcode as a general purpose programming text editor, which for me mostly means a lot of random Perl files. Xcode has always been fast, and done and a perfectly lovely job of syntax coloring for me. I had my default window size set to exactly half the width of the screen, meaning I could have two text documents open side-by-side on my Macbook Pro, kind of like this:

Xcode 4 no longer remembers window sizes. So every single time I open a text file, it looks like this:

If I want two windows open side-by-side, I’m forced to manually resize them each and every time. AUGH!

Time to start looking into alternative text editors (TextMate?) and/or window management solutions (Divvy?)…

Neven Mrgan recently went on a bit of a rant about some poorly designed iOS icons. In particular, he raises the following point:

Look at the actual app icon on the actual device.

Sounds simple, but by the looks of things there are some pretty big name icons that just don’t look quite right. More relevant to me though, he mentions the little feature of iOS where app names have a maximum length, past which they appear as some kind of mishmash of the app name and “…”. Good news, you can fix this with a little application of the Bundle display name property.

Did I want OneThingToday to appear as 1ThingToday on people’s iPhones and iPods? Not really. Was it better than the alternative, OneTh…oday? Definitely!

via The Brooks Review

This one happened while I was traveling in Florida last week – but I am still pleased to announce that Task13 is now available on the Mac App Store. For just shy of a dollar you get a fairly bare bones task management app that solves one very simple problem for me:

Hierarchy

Task13 gives you tasks and subtasks, though subtasks don’t themselves have subtasks, it only goes two levels deep. I like having a single, flat list of tasks. But I also like having some detail and structure available about each of these main tasks. This is something I wrote a long, long time ago, and decided to give a second life via the MAS. Enjoy!

Exciting news – as of last night EmailMyCal is now available for purchase on the Mac App Store for only $0.99. It’s a very simple app – every morning (or really any specified time), EmailMyCal will email you a copy of your day’s itinerary according to iCal. Now perhaps I’m biased, but for me this has been a real lifesaver.

How so? While I use iCal to add events, I have a hard time remembering to actually go and check iCal to see what’s coming up during the day. This has resulted in me missing a few (luckily non-crucial) events recently. But I pretty much live in my email inbox, so having a copy of the day’s events sent there in the morning means I’m no longer missing anything.

This is what today’s email looked like:

You can organize strictly by time or first by calendar, and you can opt to have information from only a subset of calendars emailed to you. Go check it out now!

Caveat: I don’t actually own an iPad, and have never used one for more than 5 minutes, but this footnote from Marco’s recent post about The Daily (via Ben Brooks) struck me as curious:

And I have one to add: The startup melody, which serves no purpose, ignores the Mute setting. I will therefore never launch The Daily in public, because I’m extremely embarrassed whenever my electronics are audible to others.

Should this be possible? For Apple, a company that prides itself on attention to detail, the ability of an arbitrary app to completely override the mute button seems like a grievous error, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating. How is it okay to allow apps to completely ignore the volume setting specified by the user? How is this even possible? Is there some sound API with an “Ignore System Volume” setting?

[[NSAnnoyingSoundSystem defaultSoundSystem] playSound:lameStartupChime overrideSystemVolume:YES]

Now if an app were to truly abuse this, and play sounds/music constantly at full volume, people would hate it immediately and the developers would have no choice but to fix things. Which makes something like a startup chime all the more insidious. Subtle enough that you don’t even notice it until you embarrass the heck out of yourself in front of the wrong person.

Finally, if this is via some private API call, methinks The Daily needs to go back for another round of review…

That’s right, it’s confession time around the Line Thirteen offices this time of year. So allow me to repeat myself:

I don’t use RSS. Or Instapaper.

That sound you hear is the collective gasp of thousands of Mac and Internet nerds wondering how this is possible. How somebody with a blog (well two actually), and somebody who is a (very very small time) Mac/iOS developer could possibly not use either of these wondrous inventions.

The answer: I don’t want to

See, I like visiting blogs. I like seeing how somebody’s site looks. I like going to Daring Fireball and seeing the familiar colors and little stars everywhere. I like seeing Lukas Mathis’ creepy little avatar over in the sidebar. I like wishing my blog could look as cool as the Cocoia Blog. And I like the minimal aesthetic of Minimal Mac.

The thing is, if you use an RSS reader or Instapaper you lose most of that. Now that isn’t to say you don’t gain a lot of convenience (like say not having to visit a site 12 times every day to see if something new has been posted), but for the most part it’s not worth it – for me.

Today, in a piece entitled Are We Making the Web A Bit Bland, Ben Brooks starts to arrive to a very similar conclusion.

What I fear though, is that perhaps Instapaper, Reeder, Safari Reader, Readability, NetNewsWire, Google Reader, Flipboard, and any other app that allows you to read a site without seeing the actual site are starting to chip away at the personalities each site offers.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Now none of this is to say there’s no use for such services. I’m just saying that sometimes, or for myself most of the time, it’s nice to read somebody’s words in their native habitat.

I’m probably going to start using Instapaper soon. There are many occasions where I need to save something to read later, and these days I just leave the browser tab open. This is a decent enough solution because right now I don’t have an iPad or an iPhone, and don’t carry my iPod Touch around that much. But with the impending release of a Verizon iPhone, that’s going to change and I think Instapaper is going to make it’s mark on how I read online.

Last night I had a dream. For the most part it was one of those very real yet very confusing dreams which are both completely mundane and completely nonsensical at the same time. I hardly remember any of it, except for one part. The part where I was talking to Ben Brooks. The matter of the television show Friends came up (don’t ask why – I don’t know), and I accused him of being too young to have watched it.

What are you, like 25?

I might actually have said 24. To which he responded (rather indignantly I might add)

I’m 27!

I didn’t really see that as altering my central point, which was that Ben is clearly too young to have been a fan of the show Friends. Now if only I could remember why that was so important…

PS: I don’t actually know how old Ben is, though his picture, which I had seen before last night, suggests spring chicken. According to his personal site (Ben has a site that isn’t The Brooks Review?), which I had not seen before last night, he graduated high school in 2001 – seven years after I did. I’m 34, so that puts Ben right around the 27 he claimed to be in the dream – uncanny!

PPS: Previous dream about Steve Jobs. I may have a problem.

PPPS: I want to point out that I did not fabricate either of these dreams.

Yesterday, I had some trouble downloading apps from the Mac App Store, amongst them the very highly rated Alfred:

Word is now that some apps on the App Store are compiled only with support for 64 bit machines. Makes sense, right? The App Store is Snow Leopard only, Snow Leopard only supports Intel Macs, and all Intel Macs are 64 bit, right?

Not so fast! A few Intel machines did in fact ship with 32 bit Core Duo or Core Solo chips, including early iMacs, early Mac Minis and early MacBook Pros like mine.

Now I can’t be sure that this is the exact problem I’m experiencing with Alfred (though I hope it is, since it’s very easy for the developer to fix), but it’s something to keep in mind if you are experiencing troubles on an older Intel machine.

Yesterday I wrote at length about Day 1 of the Mac App Store. That ended up mostly being a post about trying to figure out why OneThingToday doesn’t actually show up in the category lists in the App Store (a big problem both for me, and for a lot of other developers who are reporting the same issue).

We are now (barely) into day 2, and there is still no word from Apple – neither in response to the support email I sent, nor on the forums where developers are discussing the issue.

This is one of those times where Apple’s secrecy/lack of transparency/our way or the highway attitude seems to be the wrong approach. I don’t need this problem fixed immediately. Yes I want it to be fixed immediately, and yes I can only imagine this is hurting my sales figures, but as I’ve said before: expecting first day launch numbers to define your app’s success is not a viable strategy (and I think the Mac App Store is only building up steam).

But this is a time where I need to know that the problem is being worked on. All this takes is a quick email – “We’re working on it” – or a quick post in the forums – “We’re aware of the problem”. Four or five words to let us developers know that Apple cares, and Apple is trying.