It’s official
I am the greatest. The iPhone said so:
And I didn’t Photoshop it, either.
iPhone development
Now this is very exciting.
I predict that the iPhone SDK will be seen as a watershed in the history of computing, as important as the the first PC. For the first time, proper mobile computing will be a reality.
I can’t wait to get started developing my first app.
The river of news is diverted
I made the difficult decision to change my RSS reader the other day from the lovely NewsFire to the newly free NetNewsWire. As it happens I actually have a licence for NNW from before it was made free but I didn’t like it enough and went back to NewsFire.
Today, I achieved the nirvana of a news reader with no unread items in it. I feel like I’ve had my house steam cleaned or something. I’m still not 100% sold on NNW, but, like NewsFire, its integration with my blog editor MarsEdit and my del.icio.us client Pukka is great and it has the killer feature of synchronising with Newsgator Online so that I can read feeds from my iPhone and keep the unread/read status consistent on my MacBook Pro and the phone.
I miss the beautiful interface and animations of NewsFire, but I fought the three-pane RSS reader for too long. I think I’ll be with NWW for a while. Maybe when David releases NewsFire 2 I’ll give it another look.
My iPhone - Week 1
We might as well get it out of the way early on: I adore my iPhone. Today my old number ported over (although with some weird side effects) and so I should be a one portable device man from now on.
As always with Apple it’s simple touches that make all the difference. The screen is really crisp and rendering in Safari is utterly brilliant - it’s even sharper than a MacBook Pro. The zoom in and out are just superb - you can’t keep the childlike smile off your face. The automatic orientation detection is lovely too.
There are, of course, some features that I want Apple to add. Top of the list is a to-do list app. Ideally, that would be OmniFocus when the SDK is available (any day now, hopefully). I’d like to be able to remove the idiotic Stocks widget from my home-screen. Even better, I’d like to rearrange the screen in any way I choose. For top marks, the list of widgets should sync between the phone and my MacBook Pro.
Next, I’d like an RSS reader - ideally NewsFire. Again, that should sync with my Mac. At a push I might be willing to swap to NetNewsWire if it synced properly.
Then, I’d like a mobile blogging app - ideally MarsEdit, which I’m using to write this post.
Syncing generally could be better - although it works very well when you have your iPod cable available, it should also work over .Mac so that I don’t ever need to physically connect it. That would take care of Calendars, Contacts, Mail Accounts, Bookmarks and Widgets.
The last thing that’s missing is Copy & Paste, although that’s rumoured to be included in the next software update.
But these are little gripes. The iPhone is the best device I’ve ever bought. Everyone should have one.
Getting WordPress, mod_rewrite and Leopard to work together
I’ve been trying to get Leopard, Apache 2 and WordPress working together for a while now. I want to use the WordPress friendly URL feature, and this requires the Apache mod_rewrite module to work too. There are various places around the web that have partial solutions to these problems. Here’s the procedure I followed - YMMV
First off, WordPress is installed in /Users/jameshiggs/Sites/blog. Leopard comes with Apache 2.2 installed, but has PHP disabled by default. To correct this, go to the console and change directory to /etc/apache2 and open httpd.conf in your favourite editor. For me this means typing:
sudo mate httpd.conf
You’ll probably have to enter your admin password. Find the line that reads:
#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
and uncomment it so that it looks like this:
LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
Next, we need to make sure that your user directory allows .htaccess rules. To do this, create a file called jameshiggs.conf (obviously, you’ll need to replace my user name with yours) in /etc/apache2/users. The contents of that file should read:
<Directory "/Users/jameshiggs/Sites"> Options Indexes MultiViews AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory>
Again, you’ll need to replace my user name with yours.
The final piece of the jigsaw is to configure WordPress to use friendly URLs - which you do from the Options > Permalinks page. I’ve selected the second option which makes URLs look like this: http://localhost/~jameshiggs/blog/2007/12/25/sample-post/. If WordPress can write to the site root then it will automatically create the .htaccess file. If not, you’ll need to create it yourself in the root of your blog site. On my machine, the file should look like this:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /~jameshiggs/blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /~jameshiggs/blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
Finally, you need to restart Apache - the easiest way to do that is to go to System Preferences > Sharing panel and untick Web Sharing. Once Apache has stopped, tick it again and Apache should start up. And that’s it.
Let me know if you have any variants to this procedure.
Thanks to Bagelturf and Ariadoss for hints that helped me get this running.
iPhone beats Windows Mobile in 5 short months.
Wow. The iPhone already has a greater share of the browser market than all Windows Mobile/CE devices combined. Windows CE is 10 years old, while the iPhone is just 5 months old.
(Via 9 to 5 Mac.)
Facebook and iPhoto
I’m probably the last person in the known universe to find out about this, but I’ve been very impressed recently with the Facebook iPhoto Exporter. It adds another tab to the Export dialog that lets you create albums, upload photos and tag your friends in them. Very slick.
Here’s what it looks like in practice (click for full-size):
Not loving Stacks on Leopard?
Via Matt Legend Gemmell I found Quay - a way to have Tiger-style hierarchical folder menus in your dock, in case Leopard’s Stacks aren’t doing it for you. It’s shareware and costs only €7.
Leopard glitches
I’ve been using Leopard for a while now and, broadly, I like it. But there are one or two things that are really pissing me off.
- The PubSubAgent (used for .Mac bookmark synchronisation) craps itself all the time if you’re behind a proxy
- Disk images don’t always eject properly in the Finder sidebar
- As I mentioned before, AirPort Extreme discs don’t auto-mount or show up in the Finder properly
- iCal seems to have lost the event details panel and has replaced it with an annoying speech-bubble thing
- There are still too many apps with compatibility problems (Pukka and MySQL being the two that are affecting me at the moment)
Time Machine backups to AirPort Extreme
I was disappointed when I installed Leopard to find that I couldn’t use my AirPort Extreme shared disc as the backup location - what I wanted was to be able to backup all my Macs to the same disk without needing to attach portable drives to them.
There is a solution - you can just enable backing up to shared drives as a preference, and 9 to 5 Mac have the solution here.
[Update: it turns out that this is a fairly long way from a perfect solution - Leopard doesn't seem to support auto-mounting of AirPort Extreme shared discs - so Time Machine gets confused when the OS starts up and doesn't seem to be able to recover. There's more on that disc auto-mounting issue on the Apple support site.]
