Archive for the ‘Apple’ category

Call TextMate from command line

September 7th, 2009

A really neat feature of TextMate is the ability to call it from the command line and pass a directory or file as the object to open. Works great.

For this to work, you need to run a quick one-liner on the command line:

sudo ln -s /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/mate /usr/local/bin/mate

Once done, you can call mate and pass it any object you want to open, such as:

$ mate my_rails_app

and it opens the entire directory as if it were a TextMate project.

Lots more detail available here: http://manual.macromates.com/en/using_textmate_from_terminal.html

How to open a Mac OS X sparsebundle when it shows up as a regular folder

July 16th, 2009

This was taken from http://fplanque.com/dev/mac/os-x-sparsebundle-shows-up-as-regular-folder

What do you do if you have, say, an encrypted sparsebundle and some day you try to open it and you discover it shows up as a plain folder in the Finder instead as a bundle icon?

Double clicking will just open the folder and show you the bands that make up the bundle.

I’ve forgotten how to fix the issue,  you can at least mount the contents of the bundle by typing this is the terminal: "/path/to/bundle/name_of_bundle.sparsebundle/"

Then you’ll have your virtual drive mounted on teh desktop, and if need be you can just copy them to a new sparsebundle.

iPhone 3.0 Beta 4 Bluetooth tethering results: Less than 1/3 the speed of USB

April 29th, 2009

So, it’s rather slower – 96kbps.

To test it, i tried the ThinkBroadband speed tester, (that i successfully used to test USB tethering), but it failed to complete the test.

I then tried the Broadband speed tester site and got the above results, as well as a 74kbps upload speed.

When (if!) i find time, i’ll go digging and find out if there’s an obvious reason for this – it’s clearly shouldn’t be bottlenecked by the performance of BlueTooth, as it should run up to 3 Mbit/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth)

iPhone 3.0 Beta 4 + iTunes 8.2 Pre-release = USB Tethering Active Again :)

April 29th, 2009

Yep, USB tethering died in Betas 2 and 3, but with iTunes 8.2 Pre-release and Beta 4, all is working again and it feels wonderfully fast. Well, it’s only running at 336.58 Kbps, but it feels great! As a note, i think the fix was actually iTunes rather than iPhone Beta 4.

Lovely :)

Now to test the Bluetooth speeds

Important iPhone Push Notification consideration

April 16th, 2009

A point worth noting by all iPhone developers considering the exciting opportunities of cloud-side iPhone app notifications – how much will it cost you to provide this service?

An important point to consider.