TUAWMac 101: Two things I love about Address Book originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Last year, I was introduced to Funny Farm while working on a team project with my inlaws. I absolutely loved the idea of a puzzle that grew as you solved parts of it. The game works by associating words with their natural connections, e.g. "On the Farm" could inspire you to think of cow, chicken, and farmer (among other words). You then spin out those ideas to further connections. The chicken might be associated with rooster, hen, and egg, and so forth. So I was really excited to encounter iAssociate (iTunes link).

Developed by Fredrik Wahrman, iAssociate brings Funny Farm-style interaction to the iPhone. It's a really fun (and quite challenging) implementation with over a half dozen separate puzzles to work on, promising hours and hours of game play.

Each puzzle starts you out with a core idea. It's up to you to brainstorm ideas that fit around that idea, expanding each node into a wider set of associations. The word map is easy to scroll, and even though the iPhone display is quiter small, you can interact with a virtually large puzzle.

The game play is slightly different from Funny Farm in that instead of entering text into a central guessing area, you type text directly into nodes. If there are five nodes with six letters each, enter your guess into the central node, matching against all connected nodes. (You do get partial credit for guessing the right starting letters but the wrong word.)

I have only one real beef with iAssociate, which Wahrman promises me is being addressed in the next release. And that is the text size, particularly for the instructions. As you can see in the following image, helper overlay text is tiny. Speaking as a member of the graying community with weak eyes and a growing obsession with high fiber foods, iAssociate proved to me that I really need to look into bifocals or reading glasses. The text was headache-inducing small.

Beyond that, iAssociate was a blast to play. I enjoyed stretching my neurons a little and it makes a very good game for collaborating with friends. I do wish that Wahrman had built in some kind of multi-player feature, so groups could work on the puzzle together rather than be limited to pass-and-play. Hopefully that will be added in the future.

iAssociate costs $1.99 on the App Store. You can download a few versions (under the name "Associate This" (iTunes Link) as well, allowing you to try the game play before committing to buying the full product.

TUAW received a review promo code for this write-up.

TUAWiAssociate: Mind mapping fun originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWMore HD movies hit iTunes' virtual shelves originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWFound Footage: The iPhone and the WiiMote originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWApple adds submission histories to iTunes Connect originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Holiday time is drawing near, with Black Friday just over the horizon. So have you started thinking about what to get your favorite gal? You might want to subscribe to a Monoprice e-mail alert to catch the latest restocks for your beloved's iPhone or iPod touch. Last night, they sold out of their 2200 mAh charge boosters within minutes. I snagged mine just in time.

Because, gentlemen, you need to face it: cables, remotes, and batteries are made of holiday win. Why not consider a miniDisplay cable to give your lady that second Mac mini monitor she's been dreaming about? Those redesigned Apple remotes make the perfect accompaniment to the treadmill, when watching "The View." Or, for that matter, when watching the morning financial news. Whatever floats your boat.

One of my female TUAW colleagues writes, "Last year I got earrings and returned them for a MacBook. My husband also knows that on Black Friday morning, in the dark, I will be at Radio Shack or MicroCenter -- elbows out to fend off other customers -- hissing at the sunlight and hoarding hard drives, enclosures, and spindles of DVDs."

Face it: Chicks love technology. Trust me. I'm a woman.

Results are not typical or representative of all real women's buying habits. Please check with a lawyer before deciding whether purchasing Mac peripherals are right for you. Side effects, including being kicked out of your home and/or marriage, may occur. Peripherals are not a substitute for fine jewelry. Do not attempt to offer technology when the spouse is pregnant or nursing. Consult a physician should a piece of technology make an accelerated impact with your head. In case of technology overdose, seek professional assistance, or contact a family counselor immediately.

TUAWTUAW Gift Guides: Gifts for tech-savvy women originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I was delighted when a recent tweet put me in contact with Björn Teichmann, author of the iPhone IRC application Rooms [iTunes link]. Rooms, claimed Teichmann, could bring AOL chat rooms to our iPhones.

Teichmann sent over a promo code for his app, which normally retails for $1.99, and spent a few hours getting me up to speed on AOL chat rooms using his software. Let me explain: It's not that setting things up ended up being difficult to accomplish, but rather there weren't a lot of clear and available instructions for doing so. What Teichmann worked out over those hours was a somewhat reliable way to access AOL chat rooms via IRC.

Read on to learn more about his solution...

Continue reading Bitlbee and Rooms: Accessing AIM Chat Rooms from your iPhone

TUAWBitlbee and Rooms: Accessing AIM Chat Rooms from your iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

When Joris Kluivers (@kluivers on Twitter) set out to write his Lyrics app for iPhone, he never intended to personally take on Apple, Sony, and Gracenote. Kluivers, a student at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, was just trying to get his foot in the App Store door, not go toe-to-toe with three media behemoths. The story of how he ended up navigating through the corporate bulwarks to eventually successfully publish his latest release, Lyrics 2 (iTunes Link), with the blessings of all three companies, no less, makes quite the App Store saga.

Continue reading App Store Stories: One man's app. Three corporations. Lyrics 2 against the world.

TUAWApp Store Stories: One man's app. Three corporations. Lyrics 2 against the world. originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Dear Aunt TUAW: Recovering iPhone data and media

TUAWDear Aunt TUAW: Recovering iPhone data and media originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I generally prefer to use tcsh rather than bash. This is mostly because I'm a technological dinosaur. I also have a lot invested into my ancient and extensive .cshrc that has taken years to grow and develop.

Normally, I set the default shell inside the Terminal app preferences. But there's a problem. Snow Leopard keeps losing my preferences for reasons I do not begin to understand. With this Snow Leopard bug, I had to find another approach for choosing my shell. Terminal preferences were no longer going to work for me.

There are actually two very good ways to handle this problem.

First, there's chsh, as pointed out by Richard Buckle and Brian "Shmit" this morning. A command line utility, chsh edits the OS X user database, allowing you to change a user's default shell. chsh is built into OS X, and you can pull up a man page to read details about its use. Supply the shell you want to use, authenticate, and you're set. There is, however, an easier solution.

It's System Preferences. As Bill Bumgarner and Jordan Breeding reminded me today, you can access advanced user settings by right-clicking (or Ctrl-clicking) a user name in the Accounts settings; then choose Advanced Options. (Please note that you must first unlock the settings before this trick becomes available.)

When selected, an Advanced Options screen appears. You can set the new login shell in this screen. A simple pop-up list offers easy access to all installed shells. Select the one you want to use and, once selected, click OK to dismiss the screen and return to the Accounts settings pane.

This solution works a lot better than the bash .profile approach I had been using for a few weeks. Running tcsh through the .profile initialization file had caused an extra layer of interaction each time I wanted to close a terminal window. The application warned me that I was about to kill a running process (i.e. my tcsh subprocess). Changing my default shell meant I could create and close windows on demand without that extra dialog, a welcome respite.

In conclusion, while I'm not sure why Terminal keeps losing its preferences, I'm pleased that I at least learned a way to bypass the shell issue. Hopefully, Apple will get this bug fixed soon.

TUAWSnow Leopard Fixes: Terminal shell workaround originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It appears that the Dev Center at Apple just updated its documentation set today. If you're using Xcode 3.2 and you want to update your documentation, you might be looking in the wrong place.

Before 3.2, you used to update your documentation in the Developer Documentation window (Help > Developer Documentation, or Command-Option-?). Now you'll find your documentation sets in the Xcode Preferences window (Xcode > Preferences... or Command-, and then choose the Documentation tab). Also, if checked, Xcode will automatically update your documentation when you launch it.

This Documentation panel offers subscription options for installing a documentation set (such as, for example, Mac OS X Legacy Library or iPhone OS 2.2 Library) as well as a handy Check and Install Now button that lets you request the latest updates. Use this to keep on top of the latest documentation updates.

Thanks, Scott Lawrence and @zadr

TUAWXcode Tip: Updating your documentation originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWApple bumps Mac Mini line to add faster processors originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Top 5 reasons the Apple Store refresh is taking so long

TUAWTop 5 reasons the Apple Store refresh is taking so long originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWApple Store is down, apologies to Julie Andrews originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

iPhone developer Dan B. wanted to know if Apple would reject his application based on the name he wanted to use for his app.

So he did what you'd expect a sane developer to do. He wrote Apple. He used one of his technical support incidents to speak with the Apple Developer Technical Support teams and waited for them to reply.

They were quite prompt in answering, redirecting his question to the iPhone App Review Team.

Thank you for contacting Apple Developer Technical Support. We provide support for code-level questions on hardware & software development, and are unable to help you with your app naming question.

Please contact the iPhone App Review Team for assistance. You can contact them directly at [address redacted].

While you were initially charged a technical support incident for this request, we have assigned a replacement incident back to your account.

I hope this information is helpful to you.

So Dan contacted the App Review team. And they wrote back too.

Thank you for contacting the iPhone Developer Program. This email address is for inquiries regarding status of application submissions.

Apple is not able to provide pre-approval to developers for proposed application submissions.

We ask that you please review the Program License Agreement details against the specific application you wish to develop and submit any applications for App Store consideration in line with the application submission processes for the program.

If your application does in fact get rejected by the app review team, then we will notify you on what appropriate corrections/changes should be made.

So what's a developer to do? It seems like the only way to vet an application (let alone an application name) is to submit it and see whether Apple rejects it or not. If the name is used in the application art, you might have to redesign your screens. If the application idea is not okay, you might end up throwing away all your development costs because Apple would not give a preapproval before starting serious development.

Dan's problem reflects a wider problem with Apple's App Store black box. Developers should be able to pay for support incidents for exactly this kind of situation. It appears that Apple does offer this high level of consultation to partners and other companies that they work with (even to the point of having Phil Schiller call Google directly to discuss the progress for the Google Voice app review). Shouldn't they offer a similar kind of service to smaller developers?

Have you been able to get these kinds of answers out of Apple? If so, how did you approach the matter? Let us know in the comments...

TUAWApp Store Lessons: Picking an application name originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWApple relents: in-app purchase for free apps allows demo-to-paid originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Dear Aunt TUAW: Limiting distribution to faster iPods and iPhones

TUAWDear Aunt TUAW: Limiting distribution to faster iPods and iPhones originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Ever wanted to play an iPhone memory game about dressing up an avatar? Ever wish that the cute brother of your best friend would admire your fashion sense and want to go out on date with you? Well, now there's Fashion Fix for iPhone. And...let me be blunt. Fashion Fix is the most inane waste of time and money you could possibly imagine. And for some reason I cannot begin to fathom, my tween daughters love it. Available in both a free lite [iTunes link] and paid [iTunes link] version, this incredibly stupid app has captured the hearts of my girls.

The game goes like this: You select a level (5 in the free version, 50 in the paid version) and tap through a little "scene". In the one shown at the top of this post, a particularly vapid girl makes smalltalk with Ben, the brother of her friend. Here, Ben is impressed by her complete lack of conversation and intellect, offering to go out on a date with her.

After this conversation, you study 4 preset outfits, committing one to memory in the 15 seconds allotted. You then shop at the "Boutique" to choose a hair style, outfit, shoes, accessories, makeup and so forth. No, I am not kidding. When you're done matching the style you studied, you tap Done.

Once you do so, the program grades your accuracy, awarding up to 300 points based on how well you matched the suggested outfits. Get over 200 points and Ben returns, inviting you on a date because you have awesome fashion sense. Miss too many points, and Ben returns to say "Sorry. I forgot about an important lecture. Gotta run." Apparently, Ben is deeply, deeply into fashion. Unless you dress exactly according to the mandates of the application, you lose. And the cute (albeit effeminate) boy ditches you because he doesn't approve of your looks.

Could this get more shallow?

For anyone who has a feminist bone in their body, or knows a feminist, or once saw Maude on TV, this application is politically incorrect kryptonite. It will suck every neuron from the user's brain, replacing them with soft pink cotton. That pink cotton will, however, be able to memorize fashion plates and duplicate them on demand.

For everyone who has tweenager daughters, make sure you have a nice talk about how inanely stupid this application is, even as you fork over your two bucks. Because the powers of tweenage persuasion cannot be overestimated.

Reminder: there are more app reviews on the TUAW App Hub.

TUAWApp Review: Fashion Fix by Roiworld originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWMobileMe mixup: Address book snafu exposes personal data to strangers? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Scanner Pro (iTunes link) from Readdle transforms your iPhone into a portable PDF scanner. For US$6.99, you can combine pictures (chosen from your iPhone photo library, or taken using your iPhone's built-in camera) into a PDF document that you can e-mail or upload via WebDAV.

That's a really useful concept, and if Readdle had delivered a user interface as strong and usable as its underlying idea, I'd recommend Scanner Pro as a must buy. Unfortunately, the application desperately needs the tender loving care of a user interface design expert. [For a different -- and much simpler -- UI approach to the same kind of task, you might check out the $2.99 JotNot.]

The UI is cluttered and confusing. You're forced into unnecessary screens by a poorly designed work flow. Here's an example; once you scan a new page, the interface asks you to either go back or to process the image.

Tapping the Process button enters a processing screen, where you can then click an Adjust button. This finally reveals a pair of sliders for adjusting the brightness and contrast settings for grayscale and color. The screen shot at the top of this post shows the Adjust screen.

The sliders do not provide any live feedback. You can adjust them all the way down and all the way up (the shot was snapped with the slider set to 100% Brightness) without any change to the image you're seeing. The enhancement gets applied after you click Apply. At the same time, the sliders disappear. Want to make a few tiny changes? You need to Adjust/Slide/Apply for each adjustment. That's bad design.

As you can also see in that picture, the (hard-to-see) undo and redo options appear tied to the grayscale and color choices, but in fact they are not. That's bad design. The fonts used and the button choices throughout the application are pretty ugly as well. Consider the buttons at the top of the screen, the small slider labels at the bottom, not to mention the choice of all lower case for the grayscale/color segment controller. The entire application appears to have been designed by committee.

There is one element though that I thought was pretty cleverly done, and that is the page layout and re-ordering screen. Using very, very big table cells, you can easily drag each page into the order required. I think the thumbnails are, perhaps, a little bigger than needed, but I thought the conception of how the page ordering works was pretty solid.

In the end, Scanner Pro provides some great functionality. It delivers that functionality in an ugly and somewhat confusing package. Do I recommend it? Yes. I can see using this whenever I'm on the go, to collect receipts, transform written documents, and so forth. My 3GS's camera with its capable focus can definitely make the best use of this software. This is a terrific idea and I love the ability to carry that functionality around with me on an iPhone.

At the same time, Readdle needs to step back and seriously evaluate their interface. Because that flawed interface is hiding a wonderful application that deserves better interaction. And if they don't do so, their competitors will -- as noted above, JotNot [iTunes link] will also do PDF conversion from the camera (single-page docs and whiteboards vs. the multipage support of Scanner Pro), plus Evernote and Wi-Fi integration, with a smoother UI and a lower price.

TUAWFirst Look: Scanner Pro for iPhone gives you PDFs and eyestrain originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading TUAW Live Chat with App Store developers

TUAWTUAW Live Chat with App Store developers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Is the App Store working just right? That's what Mike Schramm wondered the other day after this Newsweek article appeared, discussing the state of publishing apps on App Store. Tomorrow, we'll be hosting a live chat with real App Store developers, both successful and struggling. Please join us. You'll have a chance to hear about the current state of iPhone development and ask your questions about whether App Store is a gold rush, a business opportunity, or a disappointment.

(Full disclosure, I was interviewed for the Newsweek article, although I do not appear in the article itself.)

TUAWAnnouncement: App Store Livechat, Friday @ 12PM originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I don't quite get the food and exercise logging apps -- I find that it's simpler to do all that on my primary Mac, using a physical notebook (you know: paper, pen, old tech) when I'm on the go. As for the stretching and exercise guides, I find them awkward. I'd rather use a DVD or a Wii-based game (I adore Gold Gym's Cardio Boxing, for example) where I don't have to keep referring to a 4-inch screen all the time and the sound is clear, and the instructions are easier to follow.

So what am I missing here? What are the really good iPhone-based fitness apps? I feel like all the ones I've tried just keep missing the point: to make exercise better or funner([TM] Apple). Yes, they make exercise more portable, but do they provide a better win over Nike+, a bike computer or a garmin?

Please do chime in in the comments. Let me know what iPhone Apps I have been missing, and which ones will improve my exercise experience, whether in the home or on the jogging path. Surely, there have to be some winners out there, and I'd love to hear about which apps are working for you, and why.

TUAWiPhone and Exercise: What apps do you like? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Dear Aunt TUAW: Repurposing an old iPhone

TUAWDear Aunt TUAW: Repurposing an old iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

After my post earlier this week about transmitting Mac audio, readers contacted me about extending this solution. Although they liked the idea of direct audio while working out on a treadmill or exercise bike, several stated that they also wanted to watch from the sofa once the spouse or the kid go to sleep. The idea was the same: audio transmission to an iPhone or iPod touch. The source was different. They wanted to watch live cable TV or their TiVo. And for the punchline, their media center Mac lacks a tuner. Was there a similar quiet Mac-based solution that would let them transmit the TV audio from these non-Mac sources?

If your Mac has a microphone jack, internal or even through an external USB solution, the answer is yes. You can easily connect your TV audio to your Mac just like you would connect it to a pair of speakers. Run a cable between a spare audio output (modern TVs usually offer more than one, if not, you can use a splitter) to the microphone jack on the Macintosh. On my low-end TV, this means an RCA stereo cable that feeds to a standard stereo minijack plug.

Setting up the Mac host is simple. Instead of feeding audio via Soundflower, as described in the earlier post, choose your microphone audio input in the Skype settings. Start a call to your iPhone or iPod touch, switch the TV source (usually via a "Source" button that picks which signal to watch, such as Composite 1, Component 2, etc.) to your normal cable or TiVo input. Set the external speaker volume to zero. The signal arrives at the Mac microphone independently of those speakers.

You may find that the audio out signal tends to be on the low side. Many TV speakers provide their own amplification. If this is a problem for you, you can hook in an inline amplifier. (I use an old Radio Shack 277-1008C.) Alternatively, you can boost the audio via a third party program like Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro.

This solution takes a few more cables, components, and connections than the Mac Audio-to-iPhone through Skype set-up discussed in the earlier post. But if you have the cables on-hand already, it offers an inexpensive solution compared to many other wireless TV headsets on the market right now.

TUAWFollowup: Transmit TV audio through your Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWSave a little on your existing AT&T iPhone plan originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Saurik live chat: Learn about Apple's new signature server

TUAWSaurik live chat: Learn about Apple's new signature server originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWFound footage: Dashboard for iPhone on your lock screen originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWAnnouncement: Saurik live chat at 4:15 (ET) today originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Earlier this month, I wrote about connecting my old Mac mini to my television . My mini offers a great Apple TV-style lifestyle with none of the Apple TV limitations. It's a real Mac running real Snow Leopard, albeit on an older, admittedly limited mini. I have Front Row, EyeTV, QuickTime, and more, all ready to entertain me on demand, as well as standard system access to mail, web browsing, etc.

The sound in my living room is powered by a couple of speakers that shipped with an ancient computer monitor. Their audio works fine for close-up TV watching and Wii playing. Move across the room and those speakers prove how limited they are. Add in a treadmill with its motor noises, and the sound decreases to virtually nothing.

So how can one listen to those great shows that are playing back on that lovely large screen across the room, especially when walking or jogging on the treadmill? I messed around with several solutions until I stumbled across one that really worked well for me. Using my home's 802.11g Wi-Fi network, I could call my iPhone from my Mac using Skype. With only the most minimal of lags, I was able to transmit live audio and watch my favorite shows on the Mac while listening on the iPhone from my treadmill.

Read on to learn how I accomplished this...

Continue reading TUAW Tips: Send Mac audio to your iPhone for cheap

TUAWTUAW Tips: Send Mac audio to your iPhone for cheap originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I was chatting with my TUAW colleagues this morning about Mac versus iPhone programming. And as per usual with these conversations, we veered in the direction of unfettered speculation. It's an occupational hazard.

As someone who regularly develops on both platforms, I declared that the iPhone represents the future of Mac programming. The iPhone, I posited stated, offers a great new platform without the need to be fully backwards compatible like the Mac. Our own Victor Agreda challenged me to back up that position. After a bit of time and thought, I decided to do so in this post.

My key point is this: Apple's engineers have learned a lot of important design lessons during the history of OS X. When the iPhone debuted, it gave those engineers the chance to rebuild an OS and an API from the ground up. Those engineers could craft a platform and its libraries that built on the Mac's successes without dragging along its less fortunate design decisions. Yes, there were some lemon frameworks that initially made the grade, but over time, Apple has reduced their number.

Even now, Apple continues its iPhone design process, adding new frameworks and APIs at a prodigious rate. The iPhone OS remains a work in progress, developing in ways and directions that the initial release two years ago could not have anticipated. And Apple does this, knowing fully that the closed platform allows them a great deal of design freedom that would not have been possible on the open Macintosh.

Whether you're working with buttons, menus or simple text views, the iPhone development approach simply works better: beautiful 2.0-style properties, consistent API design, better-thought-out object inheritance trees, and so forth. With the iPhone, you see a great new platform evolving without the need to be fully backwards compatible

Snow Leopard, with its minimal API changes has bought the Macintosh a few years of stability. But I think it's time for Apple to rethink the platform as a whole, re-imagining its API through the lens of current iPhone OS development. While Snow Leopard offers Apple the room to stay still for now, I can see Apple moving forward in a separate engineering effort to Cocoa Touch Mac, a hypothetical cross-platform OS that supports general development on iPhone and future Mac devices like my imaginary snow-princess-rainbow-pony-iTablet.

The ghost of NeXT-past, as TUAW-colleague Joachim Bean puts it, still haunts us. It's time to exorcise the unhelpful bits of that pervasive spirit and usher in the new age of the iPhone and its API design examples. Mac OS X is, and has been, a superb development platform. What I'm suggesting is that iPhone OS might just be a better one.

TUAWIs the future of Mac...the iPhone? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading iPhone/iPod touch debrickification clinic

TUAWiPhone/iPod touch debrickification clinic originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWXcode 3.2 Daily Tip: Adding actions and outlets in IB originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• Printer compatibility enhancements for printers that do not properly appear in the Add Printer browser.
• Bug fix for DVD playback (when playback stops abruptly)
• Bug fix for the Dock (bug prevents removal of icons from the Dock)
• Bug fix for account set up and sending mail via SMTP servers in Mail
• Bug fix for Sierra Wireless 3G modems
• Adobe Flash Player update (new plug-in version 10.0.32.18)

TUAWSoftware Update: 10.6.1 debuts originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

While of my colleagues are tremendously excited about Norah Jones and iTunes LP, I've got to say I was far happier to discover the new iTunes 9 iPhone application management screens that Brett touched on yesterday (Sorry, Dave!). Located in the Applications tab for each iPhone and iPod touch device, the manager lets you organize your applications on a screen-by-screen basis from the comfort of your desktop. Unfortunately, the organizer remains fairly primitive.You can...

• ...check or uncheck apps that you want to sync or not sync.
• ...drag apps around individual pages to reorder them
• ...drag apps between screens to reparent them.
• ...change page order by dragging them within the page column.

And that's pretty much it. There's no way to sort your screens alphabetically or by category. There's no way to copy or share layouts between devices. There's no undo support if you change your mind about any changes. That having been said, there are some iTunes 9 tricks that may help you better organize your applications. Here are TUAW's top four.

Use Command-Click to group apps. Command-clicking an application icon adds it to (or if already added, removes it from) the currently selected group. You can move groups all at once between pages.

Use empty pages. If you have the pages to spare, use the empty pages that iTunes makes available to you to help organize applications by "theme". For example, you can drag an empty page into, say, the page 2 position and then start filling that page with games from the other pages. Adding apps to that empty page causes another empty page to appear at the end of the list if there is room. You're limited to eight 11 pages total for your applications.

Use the dock. Your dock provides a home for up to four applications that you use the most. Docked applications appear on every page, offering the quickest access to your most-used apps. Don't feel limited to the apps that the iPhone OS defaults to. It's your dock. Use it the way that best suits you.

Use the home screen. If you have more than four apps that you need quick access to, don't forget that the first screen of apps is always just a Home button click away. Tapping the home button when viewing apps automatically jumps you to the first page. Place your high priority apps on this first page if they fall short of the urgency of the dock items.

The new Application editor is certainly a great step forward from the way things were. Here's hoping that Apple will make it even easier to manage your applications in future iTunes releases.

TUAWiTunes 9 Focus: Tips for editing your iPhone apps screens originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAWThe Apple Store is down, prepare yourselves originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

At that time, you had to download a copy of the analyzer, install it by hand, and run it from the command line. It was amazingly helpful but a bit of a pain to use.

No more. Xcode 3.2 incorporates the static analyzer tool directly into its IDE. Choose Build > Build and Analyze (Command-Shift-A) and the analyzer automatically checks your code. and presents any bugs detected by the analyzer. Static analysis evaluates source code to automatically find bugs, issuing hints that are similar in nature to compiler warnings but targeted at Foundation (Cocoa) and Core Foundation memory management.

Each bug is marked with a blue icon and a description. I do wish that the text didn't seem to "cut off" so abruptly. Resizing the Xcode editor window does not affect the hard right alignment of the bug reports. This bug refers to the local watcher variable, which is allocated and initialized but not released.

The tool is not perfect. It may flag nonexistent "bugs" in programs, so there are definitely false positive results that will show up as well as gray areas. In this example, the watcher is used until the application teardown, so the fact that it's leaking is not really a problem. That having been said, the analysis is amazingly helpful and if you do find real bugs, the Clang Static Analyzer team solicits bug reports.

To learn more about your bug, click the blue branch icon in the code itself. The analyzer offers a detailed view of the bug and its issues. This presentation provides more information about the specifics of the issue at hand.

In this detail view, clicking any single blue arrow opens the Build Results pane, showing the analyzer result list. Hide or show analyzer information by clicking the blue branch icon in the left gutter.

It's easy to overlook the new built-in static analysis feature of Xcode 3.2, but you'd be missing out on a great feature if you didn't explore it further.

TUAWXcode 3.2 Daily Tip: Analyzing Your Code originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I love GrabUp. GrabUp is my BFF. It automatically uploads my screen shots to the GrabUp web site and copies the URL to my clipboard. If GrabUp were a girl, I'd marry her like *snap* that. But Snow Leopard has killed GrabUp. It doesn't work. My darling is dead.

I tried TinyGrab as well and that isn't working either. Frankly, between you and me, TinyGrab has issues. It's slow and does not work all the time. I miss GrabUp :(

Love and kisses,

Your Nephew J.

Darling J,

My heart goes out to you. I too am a GrabUp aficionado! Because I love you (and all my nephews and nieces) and because I really needed to get GrabUp working again for my own use, I put together a work-around for you! (Here is the zipped command line utility) Download, unzip, switch off GrabUp, and run this at the command line.

Grabupper looks for new screen shots on the Desktop using the Snow Leopard screenshot naming standard. When it finds them, it uploads the data to the GrabUp website, copies the URL, pastes it to your clipboard, and lets you know when the URL is ready to use.

The grabupper utility uses a few shortcuts for expedience. It only looks on the Desktop, and it only looks for names starting with "Screen shot". The reason I mention this is because you can change the screen shot prefix using defaults write com.apple.screencapture name prefix, but if you do so, you'll have to update the utility source code to match that prefix.

You'll find the source code over at GitHub. It works like this. A notification observer looks for com.apple.carbon.core.DirectoryNotification events, which are associated with the screen shot updates. When these events trigger, the file manager searches for new screen shots that are less than 5 seconds old. When it finds one, it converts the file to JPEG format (Auntie loves using non-compatible TIFFs for book illustrations), and uploads them to GrabUp.

Once GrabUp returns a successful upload response, the code extracts the URL string and writes it to the system pasteboard. It then spawns a system process to alert the user (system("say 'You Are Ell is ready'");). Isn't that just adorable?

Here's hoping this will hold you until GrabUp becomes Snow Leopard ready!

Hugs,

Auntie T.

UPDATE: Based on suggestions by TUAW co-blogger Joachim Bean, the source and executable have been updated to use the defaults written to com.apple.screencapture, both name and path. Thanks, Joachim!

TUAWDear Aunt TUAW: Snow Leopard killed GrabUp, Auntie fixes it originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It's a Menlo world in the new Snow Leopard Xcode. 10.6's Xcode uses the Menlo Regular-11 font for the standard Xcode template. If you miss Monaco (and I know I did), it isn't hard to restore the look and feel of Xcode 10.5's defaults. That's not to say there's anything wrong with Menlo. Menlo is a lovely font. It's just not a familar font and some strange part of my brain keeps freaking out every time I look at the screen.

I'll probably force myself to adapt to Menlo at some point but for the moment, I'd rather just stick with Monaco. So to do that, here are some quick instructions. As you'll see you'll need to create a new theme based on the Xcode default theme and update its font settings.

To start, open Xcode > Xcode Preferences (Command-,). Choose Fonts & Colors. Select the Xcode Default theme and click Duplicate. Enter a name for the new theme (e.g. Normal Xcode Theme) and click OK. Select the new theme, and then select all categories within the theme. To do that, click on any item and then choose Edit > Select All (Command-A).

With the categories all selected, double-click in the font column. A font panel appears. Select Monaco 10 in the font panel and then close the panel. Click OK in the preferences pane and boom. You have returned to a font comfort zone.

Got any Xcode font preferences? Can you recommend a font that's better than Menlo, Monaco, or the good old standby Courier? Let us know in the comments.

TUAWXcode 3.2 Daily Tip: Restoring Monaco originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Xcode 3.2 offers a number of really great new features, several of which will be highlighted in upcoming daily tips. Standouts include the new built-in static code analysis, the two new LLVM compiler front ends (GCC 4.2 and Clang), and the new Build Results window.

Until you install, you may run into problems using the standard C compiler from the command line. (It threw errors about not finding <stdio.h>, etc.) This despite the fact that I had already re-installed the iPhone SDK.

Once I upgraded to the new Xcode, and rebooted, the command line cc started working again. The reboot step seemed necessary because cc didn't work until I did so. There might have been a less extreme alternative I'm not aware of to use instead. (If you know of one, please let me know in the comments!)

You'll need to re-install your iPhone SDK packages as well. Make sure you download the SDK versions that were built specifically for Snow Leopard. The iPhone Dev Center provides both Leopard and Snow Leopard SDKs for each of its standard and beta distributions. Install these packages after upgrading to Xcode 3.2. I did not and ran into trouble with project creation (as well as the already mentioned command line cc) until I finally got the install order corrected.

Update: Remember, the iPhone SDK packages do not include Xcode 3.2, so just downloading the iPhone SDK for Snow Leopard will not upgrade Xcode.

Thanks go to hatfinch for his help.

TUAWXcode 3.2 Daily Tip: Upgrading Xcode originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.