mac

This year, one of my resolutions is to become a more experienced programmer—not only in web development (I can hold my own with PHP, server scripting, and web design languages)—and one of the measurable achievements I'd like to accomplish is having apps on the Mac App Store and iOS App Store.

I submitted a new Mac App, Visibility*, on January 9, and was hoping the app might be reviewed quickly so I could experience a few days on the Mac App store soon after its launch. Well, after more than two weeks of waiting, the App is still 'Waiting for Review.'

Following the advice of some other developers on Apple's Developer Forums, I submitted an expedited app review support ticket... and didn't get a response for over a week!

From the response email:

Thanks for your email and feedback. In order to get as many developers into the Mac App Store as possible we are reviewing apps on a first-come first-served basis. The size of any individual app or its fixes do not have an impact on when the app will enter In Review state.

We will get to your application as quickly as possible.

This might just be too crazy to be true, but I just thought, after reading that some of the bestselling games for the Mac were added to the Mac App Store, if there might be an ulterior motive to the Mac App Store...

Besides adding some revenue to Apple's bottom line, offering a convenient means to Mac users discovering and purchasing new software, and making the Mac more in-line with the iOS device philosophy, what if Steve walked into an Apple retail store one day last year and said:

After about a week's use of Reeder for Mac (currently at 'Draft 4' status), I can finally ditch NetNewsWire, and confidently state that I would pay maybe something like $20 for this new Mac application.

NetNewsWire has always been a little slow, a little clunky, but at least it was reliable.

Reeder brings a lot of the simplicity of the iOS Reeder apps (both of which I have - Reeder for iPad and Reeder for iPhone) to desktop Macs. There are some odd UI glitches that are simple annoyances, but don't get in the way of my personal use of the app.

However, every new draft release brings with it more goodies, more polish, and more awesomesauce.

A few notes from my initial use of the Plextor PX-B120U external USB BD-ROM drive (you can pick it up for under $100!):

1. You need to plug the drive directly into your Mac, or use a USB hub capable of providing enough juice to power the device directly. Since the Plextor drive doesn't actually have an AC adapter, it needs all its juice through the USB port. (I was trying to plug it into my weak Belkin USB hub, and that wasn't working).
2. You can use the drive with VMWare Fusion, but it seems you need Windows Vista or Windows 7 to be able to actually do anything besides read DVDs or CDs with the drive.
3. I don't have Windows 7 (yet), so I can't yet test how well a new iMac can play back Blu-Ray discs using the included CyberLink PowerDVD 9 BD.
4. I am evaluating MakeMKV (a native BD/DVD ripper for the Mac) to see if it will be able to do what I did for my HD-DVD collection—back everything up in full HD, including the surround sound tracks (I'm okay with Dolby Digital 5.1...)

I'll post back here with any new updates I find.

Here's an older shot from my previous setup at home (much has changed since then... but most things are the same—in principle! The core tenets of a Geerling computer workstation are:

1. Multiple Macs.
2. One of the Macs must have at least a 24" display.
3. Complexity (like messy cables) should be hidden as much as possible.
4. Screen real estate trumps everything else.

Earlier today, when I was working on fixing a few little inconsistencies in my mail inboxes (I currently sync 5 different accounts (with a plethora of email addresses feeding into the various accounts)), deleted messages started showing in some of my inboxes in Mac OS X's built in Mail app. They were greyed out, but not enough so that I could easily distinguish non-deleted messages...

After looking around online for a while, and not finding any fixes for this problem (I get so many emails that showing deleted messages basically makes my inbox unusable), I thought to search the Mail help for an answer.

Pesky little menu options!

I found a little menu item labeled "Show Deleted Messages" (Command-L keyboard shortcut), which somehow had been selected at some point (I can't think of why I would hit command-l in Mail... but I guess I did). Unchecking that hid the messages. Problem solved!

From MacRumors:

Google is phasing out the use of Windows company-wide due to security concerns. The move comes after news in January that Google was hacked in an attack originating in China. Those attacks used a security vulnerability in Internet Explorer for Windows. News of the report comes from FT.com who cites several Google employees.

"We're not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort," said one Google employee.

The majority of those moving away from Windows PCs are moving to Mac OS according to another Google employee. New hires are given the option to run Mac OS or a Linux-based machine.

Google employs over 10,000 individuals worldwide.

I've begun working a lot more with Drupal multisites, as doing so saves a lot of time in certain situations (usually, when you have a large group of sites that use the same kinds of Drupal modules, but need to have separate databases and front-end information.

One problem I've finally overcome is the use of actual domain host names for development (i.e. typing in dev.example.com instead of localhost to get to a site). This is important when doing multisite work, as it lets you use Drupal's built-in multisite capabilities without having to hack your way around using the http://localhost/ url.

Here's what I did to use dev.example.com to access a dev.example.com multisite in a Drupal installation using MAMP (the dev.example.com folder is located within Drupal's /sites/ folder):