Here’s a helpful MacOSX feature that I finally stumbled upon. If you hold option down while selecting text, you can select an arbitrary rectangle, instead of some number of rows. A picture is worth a lot of words:
This is great for removing extraneous information from console logs (pictured), or copying just what you [...]
EDITED TO ADD 2007-11-02: Some of the issues discussed in this article, like Script Editor messing with your code, have been addressed in Leopard. But until the majority of OS X users are on Leopard, they’re still a problem for most people. Also, I think it’s worth documenting just how many issues AppleScript tools [...]
Changing the favicon.ico for the IMLocation website was more trouble then I expected. Here’s how I finally got it working.
The first problem is making the file. GraphicConverter was doing an unacceptably poor job scaling my 128×128 icon down to 16×16. (PhotoShop can probably generate a favicon.ico like this, with little trouble, but [...]
Here’s a rogues gallery of terrible error messages I’ve encountered personally; along with what the programmers and designers should do to fix them.
I’ve been saving this screenshot for years (To be exact, since January 10, 2000):
An unexpected error occurred, because it cannot be found.
[OK]
Seriously, WTF? This is one of the best (worst?) examples of [...]
EDITED TO ADD (post Leopard): Objective-C 2.0 introduces Fast Enumeration which is a much better way of handling enumeration then this macro.
I first saw the foreach macro used in some sample code from Michael Tsai’s blog, and I instantly fell in love with the ‘keyword’. It greatly simplifies iterating over items in a Cocoa [...]
The “Blog Stats” graphs at WordPress.com (my blog host as I write this) could use some work. One problem: the last point is bogus, and has different units then every other point on the graph. This strongly distorts the most recent traffic information (this is the most topical, and generally most valuable part [...]
I have started using Amazon.com to search books I own for a particular passage. It’s infinitely easier then linearly scanning through the book. It even beats out the book’s own index. Both in ease of use and completeness.
Google Books, and to a lesser extent Google Scholar have worked for me as well, [...]
Any errors involving NSCFType or some class you have never heard of (eg ” *** -[NSCFType count]: selector not recognized “) are indicators of a memory management bug. Most likely an object is getting released too soon. The freed memory is then re-allocated for a new object, say an NSCFType. The pointer [...]
This is what the Apple HIG has to say about icons. You should read it if you ever use icons. Even if you are not drawing your own icons, you need to understand how they should be used. (eg: icons in a toolbar should have a flat “head on” perspective, not the [...]
This is the best looking logo on a cheap plastic bottle cap I’ve ever seen. It’s the lid for a plastic bottle of Irn Bru.
Other soda-bottles just replicate the logo from the side of the bottle on the cap, if they design anything for the cap at all. But you can tell this [...]
