Dragonsreach

The Apple remote is a pretty simplistic device with limited features, it does what it does nothing more , nothing less. First impressions are that it's thin , really thin , its not only the thinnest remote I've ever held in my hand , but im pretty sure its one of the thinnest things produced by Apple that I have held in my hand. How does it work? When it comes to getting it to work , all I had to do was pull it out, point it at my Mac Mini and click play , you could say that "It Just Works". If iTunes isn't open when you click play , then it will be opened to the relavent place for you. This feature however has a downside ,if you have more than one Mac in the room this thing will control both , so when I had my laptop open and used the device ,musical chaos ensued. iTunes For the home user who wants to use it for iTunes the relevance of the device is questionable ,though it is handy to quickly grab and turn down the volume or change a song, the...

Earlier this week Valve advertised Half-Life 2 for the Mac with the best advert I have ever seen. They took the old 1984 Mac advert and re-created it using the source engine and characters from the game. As if the awesome(albeit 35 second) entertainment wasn't enough they offered the game at $3.40 for a limited period. It was not shortly afterwards that I made my first ever purchase on Steam(its kind of strange buying a game and not getting a box with it). The game purchase actually allows you to download the OSX or Windows version of the game , depending on the platform you are logged in to .This is great , because I have a PC with some decent gaming power and my Mac Mini (which I naturally wanted to test on) and wow ,the OSX version runs pretty darn well,especially considering that my mac mini is running only an intel HD3000. The current specs of my Mac Mini, the only non standard thing here is that I installed 8GB of Transcend Memory Performance I was ...

You may have realised that when you try use ssh -Y on another Mac from Mountain Lion you get the following error : Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.X11 forwarding request failed on channel 0 Fixing this error only takes some simple configuration. All you have to do is add these lines to the following files on both machines: /etc/sshd_config X11Forwarding yes XauthLocation /opt/X11/bin/xauth XauthLocation /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth /etc/ssh_config XauthLocation /opt/X11/bin/xauth XauthLocation /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth That should be all you need to get rid of the authentication error. Hope this was helpful.

If you were a user of Web Sharing in OSX then you may have realised that the option for web sharing in Preferences is now gone in Mountain Lion. However the apache2 background is still there ,but all of your configs have been reset(you may find the old backed up ones lying around somewhere) and you will need to bring them back before starting up apache from the terminal. First things first though, I use php for my web stuff so I want to bring that back first. So I need to edit the file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and uncomment the line that loads the php module:   LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so Save the file and we should be done(remember we need root permission to save changes to this file). Next I want to set up my php.ini. Go to /etc in the terminal and sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini Now edit the php.ini (don't forget the root permissions) to your preferences , I wont provide details on this because it depends whether you are using this machine for the...

NSLogs are great when debugging to see exactly what is going on but the downside is that they impact heavily on performance (I speak from experience on that one). Luckily there is a way to "disable" them on release builds of your application and still have them in your debug builds. we do this by simply adding the following macro to the prefix .pch file in your project or anywhere before the entry point to your application. #ifdef DEBUG #define NSLog(...) NSLog(__VA_ARGS__) #else #define NSLog(...) {} #endif If you want an explanation here it is. When you build a Debug version of an application DEBUG is defined , if its a release build , DEBUG is not defined.This macro checks if DEBUG is defined , if it is it sets NSLog to what it should be , if DEBUG is not defined then NSLog is defined as an empty code block that as you should know will do nothing , thus saving on performance.

This is just a quick tip with some basic logic on how to get a colored status bar on an iphone app ,here i will be assuming that the app does not rotate so i will be placing all the code in appdelegate in the - ( BOOL )application:( UIApplication  *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:( NSDictionary  *)launchOptions So the secret is really that there is no secret ,apples framework does not allow you to choose the color of the status bar so instead we set the status bar to the translucent  predefined style of  UIStatusBarStyleBlackTranslucent  and then we draw a colored view behind it to make it appear as though the color of the bar has changed. Here is a sample where i "tinted" the statusbar cyan in the app delegate : - ( BOOL )application:( UIApplication  *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:( NSDictionary  *)launchOptions {         [[ UIApplication   ...

I recently purchased a Mac-mini(Yes I own a Mac now) with relatively the same hardware specs as my(well the one I work with) MacBook pro, Intel Core i5,Graphics 3000(or whatever) etc. The only difference being that the ram in the Mini was only 2GB and the Laptop has 4GB,we will come back to this later. The MacBook Pro experience: My experience with the laptop has been great,never lagging and I really got used to using a track-pad instead of a mouse and found gestures very helpful for quick desktop management with a small screen.It was also very responsive and I keep tons of windows open all the time without problems.  When I got my Mac Mini,I popped it out of its box and plugged it in to my standard PC peripherals,switched it on and everything worked fine ,I got a few nice surprises too,I did not expect it to come with a wireless card or built in Bluetooth,just like it does on the MacBook. Then I tried to run Safari,iTunes and Xcode all at once(I do this often while worki...

If you don't know already I am a fan of Apples products,this is coupled with a strange fact.I have never,ever owned anything made by Apple besides the copy of Snowleopard I run on a VirtualBox. I may not own one ,but I think I can speak with authority on the topic of "MacBook Pro with Lion,WiFi problems?" because of what I have seen on another machine and what I have Internet-ed. I have seen Lion run on a 2008 15 inch MacBook Pro - no WiFi problems ,why? It was fully updated.The reason I am actually posting this is that I recently tried helping someone with this problem on a not fully updated MacBook Pro(hence the extensive internet research).Of all the strange hacks and ideas the only eureka moments on the internet are when some guy posts ,"I updated and now it works". So there,if you are having WiFi problems on your MacBook pro with Lion,Update,it seems like it works and it makes more sense than "8.8.8.8". The person I attempted to help ...