Tag: apple
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Switching To Dvorak: Seven Months Later
Today marks exactly seven months from the day I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout. Key Observations 72, 81 and 77 words per minute, clocked with three different one-minute tests on TypingTest.com. In home-row-only tests I took several months ago, I was already consistently over 100 WPM. The many common home-row-only words (those spelled with A,…
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Parallels Server for Mac Pricing
Fresh from my inbox.. Parallels Server for Mac will be available soon. As a thank you to all participating Parallels Server for Mac Beta users, Parallels is offering an exclusive discount on a single Parallels Server for Mac license. Purchase this new software for only $700* – a 30% savings. Hmm… well, the product has been working fairly…
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Leopard Server: Bonjour-Based DNS A Performance No-No
Prior to moving into the new OpenRain office (announcement coming in June), we used OS X’s magical .local addressing to find all our servers. This allowed us to keep almost everything on DHCP, which is trivial to set up and administer. Little did we know, however, that this was being the root cause of many…
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Five Major Apple Design Irritants
Apple, My software development firm–OpenRain in Arizona–spends buckets of money on your products. Stuff works pretty well in general, but you really need to address these issues. Really. PowerBook, MacBook and MacBook Pro power supply cables invariably rip. Not only that, but it’s always at the same freaking places. The MackBook/Pro power supplies are better…
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New MacBook Pro Battery
The stock battery on my 1st-generation MacBook Pro has only been providing an hour of power as of late. When I hot-swapped in a fully charged new battery from my local Apple store, I was thrilled with the estimated remaining charge.. I highly doubt it will actually last this long, but one can dream. 🙂
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Cool Daily Links
SearchMe.com :: Google search meets Apple’s “Cover Flow” for the web. Smells hot to me. iPhone SDK Gets Interface Builder :: Now it’s actually fun to learn about native iPhone application development. Upcoming Free iPhone Development Webcast Monoprice.com :: You need to buy your random cables from these folks. I started using them last year…
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Redmine w/OS X OpenLDAP, Parallels Server and JumpBox
OpenRain used a slew of crappy Trac sites for issue tracking until we switched to Redmine several days ago. The decision came because.. Redmine can authenticate off LDAP with trivial configuration. Redmine has multi-project support out-of-the-box. Redmine has some nifty Gantt chart and calendaring schwag and is generally better. Parallels Server (for OS X) is…
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Debugging JavaScript With Safari
I usually use FireBug and other FireFox-based tools for troubleshooting JavaScript issues, but never found a solid way to approach it in Safari, my primary browser. It turns out that the nightly builds of WebKit (Safari’s core) also come with a great utility called Drosera.app, which allows you to attach to a running WebKit process…
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Mac Users: Buy This Now
https://www.macheist.com/buy/invite/94211 The latest MacHeist bundle: $50 for 12 apps, the most notable being Pixelmator, CSSEdit and Snapz Pro X. I picked up the 3-pack bundle for $100 and a total of 36 license key. 4 days left. w00ties!
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Writing Good Error Messages
I received this little note from my Mac today. This made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside despite the interruption of my work because it satisfies my general criteria for displaying error messages to users. A graphical severity indicator is given so I know whether or not to care. It provides a succinct, human-readable…