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Everything else

  • Remember to Backup

    November 26, 2011 1 min read

    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 […]

  • Publishing Your Blog with Dropbox and Jekyll

    November 16, 2011 4 min read

    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. […]

  • Guessing a User’s Location on iOS

    September 25, 2011 4 min read

    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 […]

  • Why I Took the Job

    September 11, 2011 2 min read

    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! […]

  • Switching From WordPress to Jekyll

    August 28, 2011 6 min read

    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 […]

  • Automatically Reposition the iOS Simulator on Screen

    July 12, 2011 1 min read

    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 […]

  • Creating a Universal Binary With Xcode 3.2.6

    July 8, 2011 1 min read

    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 […]

  • A Big Mouse Cursor

    May 25, 2011 1 min read

    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 […]

  • Experimenting with Piracy – An Indie Mac Developer’s Perspective

    May 18, 2011 9 min read

    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 […]

  • Syncing Your Adium Chat Logs into Dropbox (again)

    April 20, 2011 1 min read

    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 […]