Author Archives: Angus Hardie

Digital Camera Teardown

Here is a video showing a breakdown of a lumix digital camera. (mikeselectricstuff/YouTube) The amazing thing is how small the mechanical parts are, and how many there are in there. This camera probably costs no more than £200, yet there are minuscule parts … Continue reading

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Kodak bankrupt?

Kodak, perhaps the photography company, appears to have filed for bankruptcy. It seems to be something of a representative for the state of the non-digital photography market, which looks pretty much dead except for a few limited areas. In recent … Continue reading

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The Web Development Kit Bundle

Just hours remain to buy the The Web Development Kit Bundle. It’s got a useful mix of tools for Mac web development and its an excellent bargain even if you’re only looking for one or two items in the bundle. … Continue reading

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Web Development Toolkit

HTMLValidator is one of the apps in the new Web Development Toolkit bundle, which is available now. The bundle contains 10 apps for a single low price of just $39.99 If you’re doing web design, there’s probably something here for … Continue reading

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Versions, validateMenuItem: and NSMenuItem

If you find when developing in 10.7 that you get a versions menu with a NSMenuItem as one of the items, it might be worth checking to see whether you’re correctly using validateMenuItem: This problem may happen if you return … Continue reading

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Runesoft updates games for Lion

Last year I bought  “Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood”; it’s a fun, 3d person, tactical combat game where you play Robin Hood or one of his merry men in the fight against the sheriff of Notingham. When I bought … Continue reading

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Flash player updating on Mac

Flash Player on the Mac is always in need of an update – or so it seems. One particular problem is that the current update checking system seems to merely displays a web page with the current version numbers. That … Continue reading

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SQLEditor upgrades

One of the big questions I’ve been thinking about recently is how to price upgrades for SQLEditor. So far upgrades have all been free as 1.0 became 1.1 and eventually 1.7. But with the new 2.0 release appearing soon, the … Continue reading

Posted in Company News, General, SQLEditor, Writing Software | 1 Comment

Xcode 4 – Great!

Xcode 4 took a little while to get used to, but as I’ve been using it more, I’ve been liking it more. The change initially is significant, and there were new ways of doing things and certain other things that … Continue reading

Posted in Macintosh, Writing Software | 2 Comments

Lion Released

Lion is released! Things seem to be going well. SQLEditor appears to work correctly. There is one identified issue which means that you cannot register the app for all users of a machine. Each user must register the app separately … Continue reading

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SQLEditor and OS X 10.7/Lion

The release of OS X 10.7 Lion is approaching very fast and the question must be: is SQLEditor compatible? The answer is that I expect that SQLEditor will be compatible with OS X 10.7 when it is released in July. … Continue reading

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MySQL 5.5 + Ruby + Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6

The trick is that the library install path isn’t right in the gem bundle. The following commands fixed it for me: $ cd /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.8.1/lib $ sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib mysql_api.bundle $ cd /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.8.1/ext $ sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib … Continue reading

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Talk Talk Door step selling

A truly remarkable piece of door step selling occurred to me this afternoon. Three people turned up at my door, claiming to be from Talk Talk, complete with ID badges. (So possibly genuine?) I said I wasn’t interested, but one … Continue reading

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SQLEditor Diff Support: A Sneak Peak

Development work is continuing on SQLEditor, and I thought I’d post a sneak peak of some features that will be arriving fairly soon. Today the feature is Diff support. Yes, it’s something that people have been asking for and something … Continue reading

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Adobe and Growl

I recently spotted the following line in an online forum by a person associated with the Growl notification system. I’m tired of being yelled at and having my life threatened, but that’s at least better than being insulted like this. … Continue reading

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SQLEditor now zip file not a dmg

In a change that will probably affect almost nobody at all, SQLEditor is now being distributed with a zip file rather than a dmg as the default download. Why? Zip files are simpler to create It prevents the problem of … Continue reading

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Chalkboard paint

Chalkboard Paint makes a chalkboard anywhere you can paint. Some ideas on what to actually do with the stuff on the walls. I like the idea of a calendar made of the stuff.

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SoyLatte 10.6 bundle template

This is a simple template to use SoyLatte in Mac OS X 10.6 and have it appear in the JavaPreferences system. You need to copy all of the contents of the /usr/local/soylatte16-i386-1.0.3/ directory into the directory contents/Home (inside the package), … Continue reading

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Mac OS X will still have Java in the future.

There has been lots of stuff written recently about how Java on the Mac has been deprecated. The reality is that one particular Java runtime has been deprecated: the one that Apple write themselves. Java as a language will still … Continue reading

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Drizzle JDBC supports MySQL

I came across the Drizzle JDBC driver today, which seems very interesting Most interesting though, is that it supports MySQL and it is BSD licensed. This could solve some of the licensing problems that applications like SQLEditor run into. I’m … Continue reading

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