blog.no-panic.at

Facebook iPhone Dev Quits Project Over Apple Tyranny

What a shame! Joe Hewitt was a very skilled iPhone developer and it’s a pity to see him move back to the web because of Apple’s App Store policies.

My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.

The web is still unrestricted and free, and so I am returning to my roots as a web developer. In the long term, I would like to be able to say that I helped to make the web the best mobile platform available, rather than being part of the transition to a world where every developer must go through a middleman to get their software in the hands of users.”

via Techcrunch

Here’s quite an interesting interview with Joe Hewitt from earlier this year at the Mobile Orchard Podcast.

I use the really great macFUSE to mount several server directories via SSH on my work computer. One programm that makes this process really easy is Macfusion which offers a menu item and a standalone application to configure your mountpoints and mount/unmount them.

After upgrading to Snow Leopard recently Macfusion & macFUSE stopped working, so I was searching for a solution and luckily found one at Racker Hacker - Fix MacFusion on Snow Leopard.

Now I’m happily developing my PHP projects again in Netbeans with my remote dirs mounted via SSH

As much as I love the new Safari Beta Apple put out recently, there are a few problems which I’d like to point out.

• GrowlMail - As nearly everybody should know by now, the new WebKit kind of breaks the GrowlMail plugin for showing previews of new incoming mails. As a result I uninstalled the plugin and now I’m using Mail.appetizer
• Right click - I’m not entirely sure if this is indeed connected to the new Safari Beta, but since installing it, right clicking in most of my apps results in an application lockup for several seconds to minutes.
• Top Sites - I frequent quite a few online forums and as a result of them showing up in the top sites, I can’t see the “Posts since last visit”, because the sites seem to be loading in the background whenever the Top Sites are visible. So if I don’t click on the sites each and every time, the forums still count it as a visit and I “loose” the newest posts. Now I try to keep my Top Sites free of any online forums. We’ll see if that works out.
• Wordpress Visual editor  - A very annoying bug prevents me from adding links in Wordpress’ visual post editor. The screen dims and the link overlay kind of displays but I can never click anything in it. Only remedy is to close the tab and reload it. I switched back to the HTML Editor on my blog now…
• HTML Access Keys - I can’t use CTRL + S to submit HTML Forms that have the accesskey property set on their inputs. Kinda sucks for me, as I’m a total keyboard shortcut junkie.

That’s it for now, I’ll add to that as I encounter more.
(And yes, I also submitted those bugs to the Apple engineers as any good beta tester should do!)

[update:] There’s a fix for the GrowlMail problem. See comments for details!

Today’s birthday special: get CoverSutra for free!

here: Happy Birthday CoverSutra! | Sophiestication Software.

Finally! Colloquy, my IRC client of choice for Mac OS X came out as a mobile version for the iPhone. For a mere 1,59€ (in the Austrian App Store) you’ll get a full featured, slick IRC client on your handheld device.

via First Look: Mobile Colloquy - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

This handy piece of code colors errors and warnings in make output.
(put it in your .bash_profile)

via shawnwilsher.com

An alternative would be to install colormake and use that instead of the normal make command.