Today I thought I’d share one of the more esoteric Hazel rules I use to monitor the files on my Mac. (If you’re not familiar with Hazel, an indespensible Mac utility that everyone should own, here’s a brief intro.) This rule monitors the folder containing all of my git repositories and highlights any sub-folders that have uncommitted changes. At the…
mostly nonsense
Two and a half years ago, when I first wrote about how I use OmniFocus, I was working a full-time job in addition to my committments at home and my freelance work. A year ago this week, I left my day job and ventured out on my own — devoting myself full-time to building my own apps and the occasional…
Like most of you reading this, I have my iPhone with me 24/7. Lately, I’ve caught myself compulsively checking it for new notifications. Even when it hasn’t made a sound or buzzed recently, I still have the habit of hitting the home button just in case there’s a missed notification on the lock screen. I was starting to remind myself…
I’ve written twice before about how important it is to have reliable, automatic backups running on all of your machines. I’m especilly thankful for mine this weekend. After travelling for the American holiday, I returned home to find my iMac in an unbootable state. I’m not sure what happened exactly — all I could tell is that a hard drive…
Back in August I wrote about my experience switching this blog from WordPress to Jekyll. Three months in, I’m happy to report everything is going swimmingly. I survived a few high traffic moments from Hacker News and was thrilled to see the site stay up even when I managed to break MySQL on the server. The only issue I’ve faced…
A few months ago at work we ran into an odd user experience problem. The home screen for one of our iPad apps included a small icon in the navigation bar showing the current weather. Normally it displays the weather for the user’s current location or any location they’ve saved. No problem. But what do we show the first time…
Almost four years ago today, I moved across the country and accepted a job at Yahoo!. But one of the main reasons I took the position happened six years before that. In the Fall of 2001 I was a Sophomore in college at MTSU. Each morning I’d roll out of bed and open my Yahoo! home page. It was the…
Last week I finally took the plunge and completely switched this website from WordPress, which I had been using for over four years, to Jekyll. There are tons of articles online about switching, so I’m not going to attempt to write any sort of exhaustive guide about the process. These are just my own first impressions — one week in…
If you work with two monitors of different sizes, Xcode has an annoying bug of launching the iOS Simulator partially off screen — forcing you to manually drag it into position using the mouse. It’s not that bad the first time, but after a full eight hour working day with hundreds of launches, it gets very tedious. Luckily, we can…
Last week I released a minor update to VirtualHostX. Shortly thereafter, my inbox was flooded with reports of an “unsupported architecture” error on launch. After a quick lipo test I verified that somehow I had managed to build and ship the app as Intel only — no PowerPC support. I went through my git revision history and was able to…