I don’t care that I’ll never be eligible to join NASA — having Peter Cullen (aka Optimus Prime) narrate this commercial makes me want to all the same. So dramatic!

If you were born in the 80’s like I was, and this doesn’t excite the shit out of you then you’re either:

1. A girl;
2. …

No, I don’t have a word for it. I’m going back to watch the trailer again.

I have a few simple rules for my interactions online:

1. No politics
2. No religion
3. Nothing overly personal

Reputation is a funny, slippery thing and any one of those three topics can (in the eyes of people with differing views) make or break a reputation rather quickly. I like to break all three of my rules regularly.

This post, it’s a #3.

Life has a funny way of putting things into perspective. The last 4 months of my life have been the hardest, yet the most wonderful that I have ever had. Here’s a recap (with pictures for the slower readers):

December, 2011:

I spent the first week of December cooped up in a hospital room, being infused with what my Doctor liked to refer to as a “last ditch effort to get me to the altar on time”.

December 17, 2011 is (to date) the happiest day I’ve ever experienced. Surrounded by a small group composed of our immediate families and our closest friends, Leah and I became (as we affectionately call it) “Husbandit” and “Wife-​o-​saurus”.

Leah and I also had a little surprise that we’d been keeping to ourselves. We’re going to be parents this coming June. I’m hoping for X-​men-​esque mutant superpowers from my unborn child.

January, 2012:

My Doctor’s last ditch effort worked, but sadly didn’t hold. I was admitted to hospital as an emergency case on January 25, 2012. I’ve suffered from a chronic illness for most of my adult life —- I battled against Ulcerative Colitis for over 11 years. The illness became so severe that the damage to my internal organs was beyond repair. On January 27, I had my large intestine removed in the first of what will be three rounds of surgery before the end of this year.

The great news? At the end of the year, I’ll be completely cured of the colitis and I’ll be a Dad. To be honest, I couldn’t ask for much more.

What these last few months have shown me is that no matter how bad things get, life has a way of balancing itself out. You can either sit back and let everything happen to you, or you can love and embrace the great things you’ve been given and learn to tolerate the not-​so-​great.

OK, that’s enough of that — back to your regularly-​scheduled mix of technical and non-​existent posting!

If you’re having trouble with syntax highlighting in your Xcode projects, please try this tip from Lars Schneider:

1. Increase the indexing log level by opening Terminal.app and executing the following command:

   defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode IDEIndexingClangInvocationLogLevel 3

2. Open Console.app and search for “Xcode” — specifically for “file not found” errors for header files mentioned in your PCH (Pre-​Compiled Header)

3. Fix any problems that are reported in the console logs.

Lars mentions adding “$(SRCROOT)/**” to your project header search paths in his answer, but I didn’t find that to be necessary.

The good news is that Xcode 4.2 seems to improve this situation (and a bunch of others), so grab a copy when it’s released later this week.

Thanks to Rafif Yalda for pointing me in the direction of Lars’ Stack Overflow post this morning!

If you’ve just finished installing your shiny new copy of Mac OS X Lion, here are a few tips for Apple’s replacement for Spaces and Exposé — “Mission Control”. For each of these tips, I’m going to assume you’ve created at least one new Desktop in Mission Control — if you haven’t, do that now.

Create a new Desktop for an application or window

1. Activate Mission Control;
2. Click and hold on either an individual window, or an application’s icon;
3. Drag the selected item up the top right corner of your display — as you do this, a slightly transparent Desktop will slide out from the right-​hand side of the screen with a “+” on it;
4. Drop the selected item onto this new Desktop;
5. Bingo! You have a new Desktop, with your selected items on it — simply click the new Desktop to switch to it.

Set different desktop images for each Desktop

1. Switch to the Desktop you want to change the desktop picture on;
2. Launch ‘System Preferences.app’;
3. Go to ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’;
4. Set your desktop image the same way you always do;
5. Move the ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’ window to the next Desktop by dragging it to the edge of your screen and holding it there for a second or two;
6. Change the desktop image on that Desktop;
7. Yell our ‘hooray!’ a little bit, cause it’s pretty cool to have different desktop images on each of your Desktops (‘Hooray’ completely optional).

Set hotkeys to go directly to each Desktop

1. Launch ‘System Preferences.app’;
2. Go to ‘Keyboard’;
3. Select the ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ tab;
4. From the source list on the left, select ‘Mission Control’;
5. The final entries in the list on the right should correspond to your individual Desktops — they will be labelled ‘Switch to Desktop 1′, ‘Switch to Desktop 2′, etc;
6. Set a keyboard shortcut — make sure that you enable the shortcut by clicking on the checkbox next to its name;
7. Party like it’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard running Hyperspaces (*Partying not provided in package)

Assign an application to a specific Desktop, or all Desktops using the Dock

1. Right-​click on the icon of the application in the Dock you want to move to another Desktop;
2. Select ‘Options » Assign To » All Desktops’ to show this application on all Desktops (this is useful for applications like the Finder, iChat and Twitter); OR Select ‘Options » Assign To » This Desktop’ to make the application open new windows on the current Desktop, even if you’re working on another Desktop;

Note: These settings persist through quitting and re-​opening an application, so if you ever decide you don’t like this setting follow the instructions as above but select ‘None’ from the menu.

Like I’ve said before, I really like Mission Control — it’s got the right blend of features and simplicity for the way I work. I’ve had to modify my work patterns a little, but it feels frictionless next to the old Spaces to me (hundreds of Hyperspaces users everywhere gasp!). I’m sure as we all spend more time with Mission Control, more features will come to light — I’ll post them here as I find them.

Zero stars for the Mac App Store

The end of the 'world wide web'. The supposedly free internet with no boundaries. Political boundaries now apply. To justify enforced geographical extortion. Price-gouging based on location. By Apple, no less, leading the way. First with iTunes, and now this App Store. This app costs 12.99 in the US app store, but 25% more at 15.99 for those of us forced to use the 'Australian' app store, which is in fact the very same app store on the same server in the USA. Why? When the current exchange rate dictates the price should be even less than 12.99? Because they can rip us off an extra 25% on every app based on our history of paying more for products due to extra distance shipping etc. Because Apple and this developer are publicly declaring AUSTRALIANS ARE STUPID IGNORANT FOOLS EASILY PARTED WITH THEIR MONEY.And they're right, because I am buying this app at the gouge-price - but not without a shout in anger. Because if I want this app, I now have no other option as it is not available directly from the developer or other third party site any more where once I could have bought it at the fair price via Paypal etc. I say it is enforced because I used to have a US Apple account for years, before it was even a US account, it was just an Apple account. Then they introduced the 'US' and 'Australian' versions and no more - they tell me I can only buy from my 'geographical' Australian store and nowhere else and have to pay extra for this bs nonsense. So as I see it, any developer who makes their apps only available via this App Store and hence making it my only option, is a knowing party to this price fixing and gouging, and I will accordingly score their app a measly 1 star every time. I can love their app, use their app, recommend their app, but the price gouging overrides everything else. 1 star for Hyperspaces. Zero stars for Apple's Mac App Store (and iTunes).

I can’t say I disagree with the user’s review of Apple’s price gouging in the Australian market — I think they [Apple] need to come up with a model that better reflects the current economic state of play. I’ll cop the comments about not being able to purchase via my site — for posterity, Hyperspaces is still available for purchase directly from me it’s just not linked from anywhere but inside the demo (erk!).

1. First up, profile your app using Instruments.app — I use the ‘Time Profiler’ instrument, because it’s pretty easy to see when things aren’t symbolicating properly. If you’re (un)lucky, your app will profile just fine, but you’ll be left with a bunch of addresses rather than nicely named methods and functions;
2. Stop profiling your app, but don’t close the Instruments document;
3. Go to ‘File » Re-​Symbolicate Document…’;
4. Find your app’s name in the list (search if you have to) and select it;
5. Click the ‘Locate’ button, and find the dSYM for your app (as of Xcode 4, it’ll be in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/$PRODUCT/Build/Products/Debug-iphoneos/)
6. Once you’ve done this, click OK and voila symbol names should spring to life!

Any subsequent runs of your app in this Instruments document should properly symbolicate, allowing you to get back to making your app faster and smoother — enjoy!

I consider backing up to be common sense these days. If you use your Mac for work or for play, you have information that you’d be upset were it to disappear. Not backing up is the computing equivalent of driving without a seatbelt: you might not have an accident today, but you’ll be thankful for it when you do.

I have four levels of backups setup — that might sound a bit excessive, but I’ve found some services are better suited to looking after different types of information:

Dropbox

Dropbox is the centre of my backup strategy. My most important work-​related documents all live in my Dropbox. I have a 50Gb account, of which I use about 5% for all of my client data, business records and any personal documents. I don’t store my Music, my Movies or any non-​document content with Dropbox. With the advent of Xcode 4 and defaulting to storing intermediate build files in ~/​Library/​Developer/​Xcode/​Derived Data, I can safely leave these here without causing constant uploads. FYI, that’s a referral link to Dropbox’s website — if you end up signing up for a Dropbox account, I get 250Mb of free space in my account). You can use 2Gb of storage with Dropbox for free, which is awesome.

Github

If I’m working on a development project for you, or for myself, I have a private git repository setup for it on Github. This is an absolute no-​brainer — the setup is simple, the user interface is simple and the support is great. For ~$7 (less if you’re transacting in AUD) every programmer should have this (or the equivalent for your DVCS of choice — I’ve also heard good things about Atlassian’s BitBucket).

Time Machine

1Tb external hard drives retail for about $90. Buy one, and setup Time Machine. Time Machine is far from perfect, but it’s something you don’t have to think about it — it just sits in the background and copies your changes to an external disk once an hour. It’s also a heck of a lot quicker to restore files to your Mac from a disk that’s directly attached than from any online service.

Backblaze

AKA “The Best $5 I Spend Each Month”. Backblaze sits in the background just like Time Machine, but it pushes your information up to Backblaze’s data centre for long term storage rather than to local storage. It took a long time to perform the initial backup, but now that first run has finished I don’t notice it at all (and it’s saved my bacon) after only a couple of months of use!). The brilliant feature that Backblaze offers is that they will send you a physical hard disk containing your data should you ever need it. They also don’t set limits on the amount of data you can store with them, so you don’t need to cherry-​pick what you’ll backup — just let it do everything!

If you want to keep reading about backups, there’s plenty of great info on other approaches at the World Backup Day site.

I had one of those ‘cold shivers running down your spine’ moments this week, when a simple Dropbox problem wiped out an entire client Xcode project. I’m not entirely sure why it happened — I assume because of my constant rebooting between Snow Leopard and Lion (and subsequently ‘out-​of-​time’ file dates), but by the time I realised what was going on, neither Dropbox nor Time Machine had a copy of the files. Had I not set up three levels of backups, I might as well have been burning incense to the gods to get my data back (did you like that? I tied the pretty photo I took to the words on your screen!).

Thankfully, Backblaze was far more thorough than either of these services and 5 minutes after running through the online restore wizard I had a full copy of the project on my hard drive, and was knee deep in code again. Thankyou, Backblaze — you saved me stress and time, and the $5 (well, $4-​something Australia) per month to backup my Mac is something I will not question again.

If you rely on your Mac professionally, and you keep anything remotely important on there please take the time to verify the integrity of your back-​ups.

Steve Jobs compares the currently sprouting wave of “post-​PC devices” to cars, and PCs such as they exist today to trucks. For most things most people do, you don’t need a truck, and it’s a lot of dead weight to haul around with you. I can see his point to a certain extent, but right now, the argument doesn’t hold.
…
Some people will say “real people don’t care about the file system”. Well, okay, sure. Real people still group materials together from multiple applications into one folder for whatever project it is they’re working on. Real people still aren’t satisfied with a row of chronologically ordered, scrollable thumbnails where the only recourse for secrecy is removal, and the only recourse for reordering is frail and time-​consuming and involves re-​saving everything.

This was taken from waffle software’s “Redefinition” post, and I have to say this is one of the most succinct, straight-​to-​the-​point pieces of writing I’ve read about the dumbing down of consumer’s perceived expectations versus their actual wants of technology. I’ll let Jesper speak for himself rather than reproducing the article here, but I heartily concur.