The Elegant Chaos Blog

April 15, 2012

And hot on the heels of 1.1b2, here’s another beta.

This one shows a reminder “tweet” every now and then if you’re running a beta version, or a demo version (this is in preparation for finally charging something for the App Store version, at which point there really needs to be some difference between it and the demo!).

Grab the new version from the beta software page.

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April 14, 2012

Another beta, with a couple of bug fixes.

  • The auto-completion when posting new tweets now behaves a bit more sensibly and doesn’t keep popping up when you’ve just done a completion.
  • The mentions badge should be a bit saner now, tweets that are mentions get cached properly so it should always know if incoming mentions are actually new or not

Grab the new version from the beta software page.

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I’ve been rather busy recently with all sorts of contracting work, but I’m glad to announce that in between it all I’ve been slowly working away on additions to both Ambientweet and Neu.

First up for public preview is Ambientweet 1.1b1.

The main thing that’s new in this release is the ability to focus Ambientweet on a search term and have it cycle through tweets that contain it.

This opens up a pretty handy new use for Ambientweet - if there’s a term trending or a topic that you particularly want to follow, you can set Ambientweet up to display just those tweets (perhaps whilst you continue to view your own stream with another client).

Feel free to give the beta a try….

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March 21, 2012

So, NSConference 2012 has finished. I wanted it to go on for another week, but alas it was impossible, and that many cooked breakfasts probably wouldn’t have been advisable.

I won’t go for a full on summary of the whole thing - a few other folks have been doing a good job of that.

Here’s a quick take on my initial thoughts though. After further reflection I may have more, or may revise these ones.

The Good

  • Seeing old friends
  • Making new friends
  • Some great inspirational talks
  • Lots of valuable Nuggets Of Information (tm)
  • Tom bringing me my favourite beer

The Un-Good*

  • Not enough technical content for me this year
  • Some (undeniably brilliant) speakers essentially doing the same talk as last year
  • Quality of the blitz talks varied wildly, and I think I preferred them being elsewhere
  • The conference clearly needs more QR codes

(*this may be a bad translation)

Overall though - another fantastic experience. Many thanks to Scotty and the whole team for looking after us all so well.

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March 02, 2012

Daniel Pasco just blogged an article named Radar Or GTFO.

The gist of his argument is that it’s all very well moaning about Xcode 4, but unless you file Radar bugs on it, you don’t have a leg to stand on.

Since I’ve recently been moaning about Xcode 4, I have a view on this. Not that I have anything against Daniel, but from the title of this blog post, you can probably guess what it is.

Funnily enough, a few weeks ago, I was also moaning about Radar.

You can read the post if you want the full details, but my basic point about Radar is that it’s a crock of shit for anyone outside of Apple. It’s an impenetrable black hole - bugs go in, but little or nothing ever comes out. It takes a lot of time to make a well formed bug report, yet Apple won’t even let you know whether or not they know about an issue unless you go through all of that effort.

If you are lucky enough to have someone publicise a radar number that you can file a duplicate on, you can avoid some of this work, but even then it’s far harder that it ought to be to just post a “me too” report. You can’t even see the content of the bug report so you have to take someone’s word that it’s actually the issue you are complaining about (Open Radar is a little help in this, but it’s run by us, not by Apple, it’s entirely voluntary and therefore very incomplete, and using it is potentially even more work).

I have every sympathy for Michael Jurewitz (developer tools evangelist at Apple), and the Xcode team - it’s not their fault that they are stuck behind The Great Wall of Cupertino. Unless Apple give some serious love to the bug reporting process though, it is they who don’t have a leg to stand on.

Coincidentally, John Gruber made a tangental but highly relevant post on this the other day.

Apple’s resorting to moaning about a lack of bugs filed in Radar is either them being deliberately obtuse, or it exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of human psychology (something that Apple usually can’t be accused of).

People do things (or fail to do things) for a reason. If we’re not filing bugs, it’s because the bug reporting process is fundamentally broken. Fix that, and we’ll drown Apple in bug reports.

Then maybe I can have a development environment that doesn’t crash on me at least once per hour.

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