So as you could guess, the biggest news here at roobasoft HQ is that Concentrate has officially shipped. So far, it’s been very successful (compared to other apps I’ve launched). I wrote a bit more about it on the Concentrate blog here.

The most enjoyable part of the release has been watching people talk about it on Twitter. This has meant a lot. Folks seem to get the idea and see how it can help them pretty quickly, and that’s very important. It means a lot when people recommend it so willingly.

To watch twitter real time I’ve been using a new Mac app, Incoming!, to search for the terms: getconcentrating, #Concentrate, Concentrate app and Concentrate OS X. Incoming! has a lot of potential, but its quite buggy in its current beta form. Hopefully it will all be cleaned up soon. Should be a great tool. Update Aug. 16th: 0.89 of Incoming! just came out and fixes both of my reported issues. If you need to keep an eye on twitter I’d definitely check Incoming! out, it’s looking great.

It’s also been enjoyable to get fantastic feedback from users. From that feedback I’ve been able to prioritize features and have scheduled what will be in Concentrate’s 1.1 and 1.2 releases.

I have a few blog posts I want to write. I’m hoping mentioning them here will help make me feel accountable and actually write them. Here are the ideas:

1. Avoiding procrastination with next actions
2. roobasoft v2.0′s secret weapon: A project coach
3. Taking the time to pay attention to details

OK, that should keep me busy until the next v2.0 post, which surely will be late. In fact, how ’bout I just say there won’t be another until October 1st. Done. It’s in my calendar. So, you know, it has a fighting chance of happening now.

[1] Yes, I set a goal I had no realistic expectation to meet)

[2] That may sound pessimistic, but trust me, it’s optimism for me.

Enough of my crying. It only took a short amount of googling to find how to do this with Leopard’s terminal:

http://blog.macromates.com/2006/word-movement-in-terminal/ also has a tip for mapping control-left to beginning of line and control-right to end of line. Making the terminal act more editor like.

Glad that’s over with.

I love that I can use bookmark keywords to tell Camino (and OmniWeb and Safari (with an InputManager)) that ‘bugz’ is a shortcut to go to the bug database. So I just type ‘bugz’ in the URL field and it figures it out. It was annoying to have to go and recreate these shortcuts when I switched browsers. It was also annoying that Safari couldn’t do this without an InputManager. Then I realized this was a perfect candidate for TextExpander! Now I have TextExpander handle all my keywords. Since TextExpander runs in almost all apps, I prefix all the keywords with a ‘w’. ‘bugz’ is now ‘wbugz’. Works a treat and has really enabled me to create a ton more keywords and not worry about switching browsers.

NO is defined as:

define NO (BOOL)0

we have an issue. 0 is also ‘nil’. Just below the definition of NO we see nil:

define nil 0 /* id of Nil instance */

Since ‘nil’ has to be a valid NSNumber *, you are allowed to pass NO as a NSNumber * parameter. If object ‘foo’ has a method ‘setBarOn’ with a declaration of

- (void) setBarOn:(NSNumber *)aBooleanAsANumber;
- (NSNumber *) barOn;

You need to make sure you never call that method with NO, as in:

[foo setBarOn:NO]; 

If you were to try to read the boolValue by hand you’d be OK. Calling ‘boolValue’ on a nil object seems to return 0, which is NO, so you wouldn’t notice the problem. The problem comes in when you use predicates.

I had a predicate that looked like:

“isBarOn == 0”

If you setBarOn:NO instead of setBarOn:[NSNumber numberWithBool:NO] the instance in question will not be returned by this predicate. Ouch. Fortunately if you were to look at the attribute that had been set to :NO you’ll see it reported as (null), which is a good hint your Boolean got set wrong.

I’m not sure how common this is or not, but it seemed worthy of pointing out. Hopefully it made some sense to someone.

I both mirror my drive with SuperDuper! and I backup some miscellaneous stuff using Apple’s Backup. One of the miscellaneous things I backup with Backup is my address book. I also sync my address book with .mac such that my PowerBook, my iMac and my mini for work all have the things I need right when I need them. However, .mac syncing isn’t perfect. This morning the sync’r asked me if it was OK to delete all my address book entries. Of course, I didn’t realize what it was asking until after I clicked OK. Next thing I knew all my iChat users switched from friendly names, to their cryptic AIM usernames. Hand hits forehead At this point I cried. Then I started thinking about the easiest way to restore. Knowing others issues with Backup, I was nervous, but realized it was my best bet. If it worked, it would take less than one minute, and it certainly couldn’t make things worse.

• Open up Backup
• double click on the “Personal Data & Settings”
• go to the restore tab
• select the latest entry
• select “Address Book”
• click restore
• watch it go.

Less than a minute later my Address Book was restored and my faith in Backup has increased. This was the first time I actually needed it, and it worked. Now, restoring my address book isn’t rocket science, so we’ll see how it fairs when/if I need it to pull a little more weight. Hopefully that won’t be necessary.

Lessons:

• read those sync dialogs
• Apple’s Backup isn’t 100% useless. In fact, for this purpose it was probably the best solution.

After I got my Intel iMac I was presented with the problem of needing to work on the same sources from two different machines. At first I thought I’d just keep two copies and use some sort of syncing software. That quickly showed itself to be problematic and I aborted that plan. Next I tried turning on “iDisk Syncing” and editing directly off the iDisk. After a day or two iDisk syncing started to complain of conflicts. That didn’t give me a good feeling that my data was healthy. My solution? File sharing over the unused gigE ports on each of the machines.

How do you do this?

• directly connect one ethernet cable between the two macs. It seems all new Apple hardware will support this without the need for a crossover cable. Check this list to see if your mac requires a crossover cable.
• assign an IP to your “Built-in Ethernet” in network preferences (I recommend a completely different subnet than your Airport is using)
• go to Finder and hit cmd+k for “Connect to server…”
• enter in the afp://{THE IP YOU GAVE THE SLAVE}
• authenticate
• choose your mount point
• enjoy

I rarely unmount the drive. I just put the iMac to sleep and try to make sure the PowerBook is connected before I wake it up. If I forget, it’s not a big deal. OS X figures it out and offers to disconnect the mount after a handful of seconds. To reconnect I use the “Recent Items” list from the Apple menu.

Why not IP over FireWire?

When I first started writing this post I was actually using IP over FireWire, which is pretty cool. However, one of the downsides I found using the FW connection was that my iMac couldn’t talk to both my PowerBook and another external drive. When I had my PowerBook plugged in to the iMac via FW the IP over FW seemed to take over the FW bus and using FW for any other device didn’t work. As I was writing that complaint for the original post I realized I had two unused gigE ports and gave that a try. As you may have guessed, it’s been working great. I wasn’t saturating FW’s 400mbps so switching to gigE gives me no performance gains, but it allows both of my Macs to be connected to each other and still talk to FW drives.

Why not target disk mode?

Mac’s target disk mode is pretty snazzy, but I didn’t like the idea of my PowerBook becoming a $2000 external FireWire drive. Plus I still do all my email, news reading, surfing on my PowerBook, I don’t want to sync anymore than I need to.

How do you type on that PowerBook?

I use synergyKM. The best way I can describe synergy is, “VNC without the display”. I tell synergy on my PowerBook to connect to my iMac over the gigE connection and the iMac is setup to share its keyboard and mouse with the PowerBook. I just tell synergy on my iMac that the PowerBook is to the left. Now when I mouse off the left of my iMac I end up on my PowerBook. It’s very handy.

screenshot of my desk brought to you by Comic Life

Having just re-installed OS X there were some settings I was accustomed to that I had to find and reset. The hardest for me to find was the ability to tab to controls other than text boxes and lists. I remember this was an OS X settings I turned on a long time ago, I was very used to it but couldn’t find the dang thing. I was getting quite frustrated without it. Finally I found it, it’s under System Prefs > Keyboard Shortcuts > at the bottom. Enjoy.

In short, rooVid makes it easy to take one video and convert it for multiple purposes. I use rooVid [1] to convert family movies I edit in iMovie and export them in two different formats for the web, one in h.264 the other in MPEG-4. I also export these family videos to iTunes so they’re always available and backed up on my iPod.

Head over to the rooVid’s page for more info.

[1] Just in case it’s not clear, I wrote rooVid so I better have a use for it.

Oh, and don’t worry, changing this doesn’t shuffle any windows, it just adjusts which display the menu and dock are on and which display is considered the primary display (this matters for some other apps like quicksilver, growl, etc).