I just learned of a widget on Apple’s developer site which seems to give good insite into delays in having your app reviewed.
https://developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/#expect
As of the time of writing, 99% of apps submitted within the past 5 days have been reviewed. Nice.
I was trying to do some stuff with CoreAnimation and ended up with this compile error:
Undefined symbols for architecture i386:
"_OBJC_CLASS_$_CAKeyframeAnimation", referenced from:
objc-class-ref in SpellPageViewController.o
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture i386
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
To fix it: Make sure you have linked the QuartzCore library.
You wouldn’t believe what happened to me the other. I was in the Apple store and I saw a trackpad and a mouse that I wanted to buy. I paid for the trackpad first which was very easy to do. But then, before I could buy the mouse one of the employees took me out to the street an began to unwrap my trackpad. I knew I wanted the mouse, so I had to go back in to the store, find the mouse all over again, and then buy it. I had thought of getting a new keyboard too, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of getting kicked out to the street again…
—
While this obviously didn’t happen at a real store – it happens everyday in the App Store. Especially on the iPhone! As soon you select an App you are taken to the home screen to see that it is being downloaded. It serves the purpose of informing people where there app is going, and that the purchase worked properly. A message within the App Store app itself would serve the same purpose and be far less intrusive.
One particularly painful point is when you download an app that you found after scrolling down a few pages in the search results. Searches in the App Store are reset to show only the first page (25 entries) when the App Store app exits.
There have times when i would have bought another app if i had been left in the store, but didn’t feel like putting in the effort to go back after being kicked out. That’s an extra 30c that Apple could have had from me but didn’t. Their loss…
Apple limits settings (and rightly so), but the iOS auto correct really needs some settings. Namely – the option to turn it off would be nice. It seems to be the most painful feature for most iOS users I know.
In my usage – a bad auto correct is far more common than a correct one.
If thy really dot want settings the default behavior should be opt-in to correct – and red underline on mis-spelled words. This would change the ios role from “know-it-all” to “helpful”
I’m a GoogleApps user and have generally been happy. 2 days ago I stoped receiving some regular emails. I quickly realized the missing emails were ones sent to groups in our Google Apps domain. So – I sent an email to some of the group email addresses and got this response:
Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
550 550 5.7.1 Unauthenticated email is not accepted from this domain. g17si24246438ibb.67 (state 18).
Message-Id: <7a90316df68e3a4c1008a795a0c86fd8@www.facebook.com>
Of particular interest here is @www.facebook.com. Nothing to do with the sender or receiving group is related to facebook in ANY way!
After reading some forum threads showing that many others have had similar problems, it soon became clear that the problem had to do with any group that I was a part of, because my email is registered with facebook.
Sure enough – if I remove my facebook registered email from the group then emails to the group are delivered. If I add my facebook registered email back to the group, emails are blocked. I’ve tried this with several groups.
This is probably related to Google’s ongoing spat with facebook about data ownership, but Google definitely sucks for doing this. I’m not trying to export my data, and I haven’t made any changes to my setup, but now, all of a sudden, any emails that go to a group that has a facebook user as a member get blocked. Gmail FAIL!
Update your group members to include a ‘+g’ in the username. Eg:
remove geoff@domain.com and add geoff+g@domain.com
Gmail allows you to use a ‘+’ in emails that have no impact on the recipient, so both the emails above go to the same place. However, geoff+g isn’t registered with facebook, so group emails will get delivered.
I recently wrote some scripts which were unexpectedly exiting with an ‘execution expired’ message. A normal catch all exception doesn’t work, because Timeout::Error apparently derives from Interruption, and not StandardError (thanks lindsaar.net). So, I had to rescue it explicitly like so:
begin
# do something involving Net:HTTP
rescue => e
# This will NOT catch 'execution expired' !!
puts "Rescue : #{e}"
rescue Timeout::Error => te
# This explicit rescue will work
puts "Rescued from timeout : #{te}"
end
It was driving me a little batty for a while, so I thought I’d share it.
I’ve recently been working on a Rails 2.3.10 project using Ubuntu 10 and Postgres 8.3 on my dev machine. The specs and features were running really slow (>30min) and I wanted to speed them up.
After some profiling and searching I found 2 quick fixes.
1. Tell postgres not to wait for confirmation that changes are committed to disk:
Add the following lines to your postgres configuration (/etc/postgresql/8.3/main/postgresql.conf) and then restart postgres. These have a very noticable affect on Ubuntu 10 using the ext4 filesystem. They tell postgres not to wait for confirmation from the filesystem that changes have been committed to disk, which results in table truncates/deletes being faster but also increases the chance of a corrupt db if your machine crashes. (that shouldn’t matter for dev/test)
fsync = off
synchronous_commit = off
2 – Use Ruby Enterprise Edition
If you haven’t seen the ‘Grease your Suite’ presention – you should watch it. If you are using rvm and can use REE on your project, you should do so. It is a lot faster (for my tests at least). It reduced my test time by 40%.
If you do use REE – add the following to your ~/.bashrc file
export RUBY_HEAP_MIN_SLOTS=1000000
export RUBY_HEAP_SLOTS_INCREMENT=1000000
export RUBY_HEAP_SLOTS_GROWTH_FACTOR=1
export RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT=1000000000
export RUBY_HEAP_FREE_MIN=500000
These exports optimize memory allocation and garbage collection for REE.
After these 2 changes the entire test suite took 9min. That is still pretty long, but much better than >30min.
All major browsers (even ie4+) now support the @font-face css property, which is great news for designers. Unfortunately there are still some kinks:
I wanted to use @font-face served up from cloudfront – so here is what I did:
What does this do? It actually embeds the TTF font within the CSS file, so it can be served up directly from S3/cloudfront and still work on Firefox. This solution works, but is sub-optimal. In particular, it bloats your css for other browsers (like mobile safari and IE) that can’t use the TTF format. 
