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Publishing Your Blog with Dropbox and Jekyll

Uncategorized Nov 16, 2011

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…

Guessing a User’s Location on iOS

Uncategorized Sep 25, 2011

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…

Why I Took the Job

Favorites, Uncategorized Sep 11, 2011

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…

Switching From WordPress to Jekyll

Uncategorized Aug 28, 2011

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…

Automatically Reposition the iOS Simulator on Screen

Uncategorized Jul 12, 2011

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…

Creating a Universal Binary With Xcode 3.2.6

Uncategorized Jul 08, 2011

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…

A Big Mouse Cursor

Uncategorized May 25, 2011

I spend about ten hours a day staring at two 27-inch Apple cinema displays. It makes coding great. But, with that much screen real estate, I keep losing my mouse cursor. I’ll have to jiggle it around for half a minute trying to find where it’s disappeared to. No more! Yesterday I discovered OS X has an option in the…

Experimenting with Piracy – An Indie Mac Developer’s Perspective

Uncategorized May 18, 2011

For the last twelve months I’ve been keeping detailed records regarding the number of users pirating my Mac apps and toying with different ways of converting those users into paying customers. I’m not foolish enough to ever think I could actually eliminate the piracy — especially since I believe there are a few legitimate reasons for pirating software — but…

Syncing Your Adium Chat Logs into Dropbox (again)

Uncategorized Apr 20, 2011

Two years ago I posted some quick instructions on how I keep my Adium chat logs synced between Macs using Dropbox. I’ve tweaked my setup slightly since then. Here’s my new approach. First, if you already have Adium on multiple machines, copy all your logs over to a single Mac. You can merge the folders easily with an app like…

Unsupported Architecture When Submitting to Mac App Store

Uncategorized Apr 18, 2011

For any Mac developers out there who are seeing the following rejection notice when submitting to the Mac App Store: Unsupported Architecture – Application executables may support either or both of the Intel architectures Make sure you verify that any included frameworks are Intel only. You can do this using the lipo command: If the output lists anything other than…