Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

Despite already having a second revision Jawbone bluetooth headset, I’m still tempted by their new ICON series released this week. This is the first headset I’ve seen other than Apple’s that uses the iPhone’s bluetooth headset battery indicator, along with other improvements over previous models.

When WordPress 2.7 was released I was looking forward to automatic updates out of all the new features. Instead of copying files back and forth through SFTP (which isn’t terribly hard, but annoying enough when you have to do it every few months), all you have to do is click a button and WordPress does the rest for you. Supposedly. I think this might have worked for me once after 2.7 was released, but since then it’s always failed, right up through the most recent 2.8.x versions. Instead, the update screen just perpetually hangs with the message “Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/…“.

With the most recent update I finally found a fix for the problem, which is apparently specific to the PHP configuration for 1&1 customers. Add these two lines to the end of the .htaccess file in your WordPress root directory:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

And you should be set!

Daniel Jalkut has a good round up of open source crash reporter tools for your Cocoa applications. This is a subject I’ve been looking into myself lately.

I enjoyed the artwork by 9000. It’s desktop-worthy stuff, although I wish it was higher resolution.

Brandon Walkin has a good blog post on managing UI complexity. There are some great tips on what goes into good UI design here.

I’ve always wanted a Katzenklavier.

Finally, Best of Wikipedia is updated frequently with interesting topics on Wikipedia. It’s a great way to kill some time when you’re bored.

Today is Snow Leopard day, and unlike many other developers I’ve waited to buy it in stores instead of installing an ADC development seed. This means I’ve been mostly in the dark about any API changes or new developer tools in 10.6, aside from what I’ve managed to coax out of the guys at the local Syracuse CocoaHeads meetings.

To give myself something to do while waiting for my pre-install backup to finish, I’m going to update this post on any good articles or write-ups on what’s new in Snow Leopard for developers. If you’ve written or seen anything that I should include here, please leave a comment!

• Tim Wood gives a great roundup of the major (and not so major) new developer features in Snow Leopard.
• Andy Matuschak talks about associated objects, which allow you to add instance variables to any class which descends from NSObject.
• Twitter has plenty of 10.6 tips from developers today. In particular, you probably want to follow Cocoa Dev Central.
• Mike Ash has a great write-up on the basics of Grand Central Dispatch, one of the most exciting new features in 10.6.
• Jesper lists some hidden gems in Snow Leopard.

Steven Frank, of Panic co-founder fame, is taking a stand against the iPhone.

When the app store first opened, there were some questionable decisions, and like most everyone, I was willing to forgive Apple a few transgressions as they were navigating new, exciting (and rocky) territory. Historically, Apple has made bad decisions, but they’ve generally corrected them. (The $100 refunds for original launch-day iPhone purchasers after the price dropped come to mind.) The boat may turn slowly, but nothing before has ever suggested to me that Apple are actively malicious.

But after an entire year of continuous bad decisions that are hostile to developers and consumers alike, we’ve moved on from “working out the kinks” to good old-fashioned getting fucked.

Every week it seems like there’s more and more developer backlash about App Store policies and the viability of making a living as an independent iPhone developer. I don’t blame them; right now the App Store is not a platform I would want to commit to. At the same time though, I’m not about to give up my own plans for the iPhone. Most of the apps I have in mind are companion apps to desktop Macintosh applications I’ve been working on over the past year or two. While I might make money on the iPhone apps alone, I don’t see them as a way to make rent as much as I see them as a way to augment and improve the work I’m already doing on the Mac. And I think most Cocoa developers will agree with me when I say that OS X is still a pretty sweet platform to write software for.

I’ve recently been invited to the 2009 Voices That Matter: iPhone Developers Conference, taking place in October in Boston, MA.

This conference is designed for Mac developers looking for a succinct, easy way to get up to speed on the specific skills needed to build, test and distribute successful applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Erica Sadun, author of The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook and our event’s technical chair, will lead an epic group of speakers at the conference including Aaron Hillegass, Andy Ihnatko, Jon Rentzsch, Steve Kochan, Fraser Speirs, Lee Barney and lots of others.

Having missed out on yet another year of WWDC, I’m excited about this conference. Many of the presenters are developers I know well through Twitter and blogs, and I have a great amount of respect for their work. I’m pretty confident I’ll pick up plenty of great tips that will help in the iPhone development work I’ve been doing lately.

The event organizers sent me a $100 discount to post here for readers. If you’re planning on attending, register here and be sure to use the priority code PHBLOG. There’s an additional $200 early bird discount available before September 12th. Also, send me an email beforehand if you’re coming and I’ll try to say hello!

I know most of you are here for the programming snippets, but in case anyone from upstate New York is reading I’d like to invite you to visit Croquet Shows. Croquet is a music booking co-op based in Rochester, NY I’m volunteering for this year. We book artists from all over the world in some of Rochester’s best venues, including Bug Jar, Boulder Coffee, The German House, and others. I’ve been a fan of Croquet for years, and there’s a lot of great shows coming this summer and fall. If you’re looking for something to do in Rochester, have a look!

Those of you who are following me on Twitter have probably known about this for a while, but for everyone else I’d like to officially announce Runner’s Log 2.0, which I hope to release sometime later this year.

I’m very excited about this release. I’ve learned a lot of lessons since the first release of Runner’s Log, and I’m using this as an opportunity to fix some of the things I was never really satisfied with, as well as clean up and polish the entire UI. Best of all, I’m making some changes to the underlying data model that will both speed things up and allow for a lot of flexibility working with other applications and devices, including an iPhone companion app I’m planning.

If you’ve already bought Runner’s Log, good news; updates to version 2 will be free. If not, this really is the best time to purchase a license. Not only will you be supporting development, but you’ll be saving $5 since I plan to raise the price once 2.0 is released.

I’ll post screenshots and beta testing information as the release date draws near. In the meantime, please add your suggestions on the new Downtown Software House UserVoice feedback forum.

Jeff Atwood recently wrote about copy and paste coding, and those small, frequently reused code snippets that pop up at every programming blog or website.

To me, the most troubling limitation of copypasta programming is the complete disconnect between the code you’ve pasted and all the other viral copies of it on the web. It’s impossible to locate new versions of the snippet, or fold your features and bugfixes back into the original snippet. Nor can you possibly hope to find all the other nooks and crannies of code all over the world this snippet has crept into.

What I propose is this:

// codesnippet:1c125546-b87c-49ff-8130-a24a3deda659
- (void)fadeOutWindow:(NSWindow*)window
{
        // code
}

Attach a one line comment convention with a new GUID to any code snippet you publish on the web. This ties the snippet of code to its author and any subsequent clones.

I’ve been idly thinking about the same thing lately, especially since I’ve started using services like gist.github to share and view small code snippets. A good example is a category on NSBezierPath to add rounded rectangles, which I remember copying from someone 5 or 6 years ago when I first started with Cocoa. If I was using this in a project today there’s no way I would remember who it originally came from, or be able to tell (except accidentally) that Leopard added the same thing when it was released and now I don’t need to use the snippet at all.

I really don’t know if GUIDs are the best (or even a workable) solution. I don’t have anything against the idea, but how can you enforce it on every blog, code sharing website, programming forum, and so on? Still, when I think about a programmer’s dream world I imagine my IDE tagging these snippets with contextual information, popping up a window with text from a blog post just like it does with autocompletion.

Steven Frank critiques the Office 2010 UI. I gave up on Office and started using iWork exclusively a little over a year ago, and I couldn’t be happier.

Set piece replicas of the Fifth Element stones are on sale for $240. They’re expensive, and yes I want them. I WANT… THE STONES.

Tweetie for Mac OS X is out, and it’s great. I’ve tried a lot of Twitter clients this year, and Tweetie is the first one to really replace the web interface for me. John Gruber has an interesting write-up on why the Twitter client app market has exploded recently.