Review of Opal

Nicely detailed review of my Opal outliner at The Mac OS X Guru. He concludes, “It is fast, extremely responsive and very intuitive.”

Xcode comments

I knew that if you specified certain strings in comments, Xcode would put an entry in the function popup. But I just discovered there were some I didn't know about. Here’s the ones I now know of:

// TODO:


// FIXME:


// ???:


// !!!:

// MARK:

Mouse Repair

I had an Apple Mighty Mouse whose scroll ball stopped working in one direction — I could scroll down but not up (or the other way around, can’t recall). I happened to have a spare, and used it for a fair while. But then it stopped working in one direction!

Desperate, I decided to push the scroll ball button (which I never use). When I did so, I could scroll both directions. I got out the old mouse and did the same, and it too now works. It happens to have a shorter cable, which I preferred, so I’m now back in operation.

iPhone Release Swamps Yahoo?

Apparently there were some problems with AT&T activation when the iPhone 3G S went on sale today. (It took about half an hour to complete when I did mine.) But what I haven’t heard anything about is that apparently the Stocks and Weather applications don’t work — I haven’t done a big survey, but two other people (who didn’t upgrade) were unable to access them. And I couldn’t on either the new or old iPhone. What both have in common is that they connect to Yahoo:

I managed to connect once, but now it’s failing again.

New MacBook Air

I upgraded my original MacBook Air (1.8 GHz, 80 GB hard disk) to the latest model (2.16 GHz, 128 GB solid state disk). I was happy with the old one most of the time, but sometimes it felt too slow.

I’ve only been using the new machine for about 3 days (and on vacation, so not at all heavily), but so far so good. The Xbench rating for the old machine was 54.2, the new one 144.88. I’ll have to do some real world tests once I’m home, but if it’s really almost 3 times as fast, I’m happy.

Facebook ID

I’m now http://www.facebook.com/ddunham on Facebook. If that matters…

Fixing the Safari 4 toolbar

Safari 4.0 comes configured (on the Mac at least) with a toolbar that incorporates the seldom-used Add Bookmark button with the Address field. And there’s no apparent way to turn it off via View > Customize Toolbar — there’s no Address Field item without Add Bookmark attached.

There is, however, a separate Add Bookmark item. To get rid of Add Bookmark, you need to drag in the separate item (which makes it disappear from its attached position), and then remove it from the toolbar.

(I had filed a bug against the beta build for this limitation; I don’t know if the workaround existed because I didn’t think of it until the final release.)