Save it into ~/Library/Application Support/Xcode/Color Themes/, restart Xcode, and open its Preferences. You will be able to pick the Railscasts Color Theme in the Fonts & Colors tab.

I dug this theme up after realizing that I haven’t actually saved the Railscasts theme I’d replicated from several months ago and was too lazy to set up another one in my other Mac.

Koen Van Der Auwera did a similar theme too so if you find that mine doesn’t work so well (I’ve only used it for Cocoa Touch development, not at all for developing Mac apps), scoot over to his blog post.

Anyway, I submitted it to the iPhone App Store for approval as a free app and named it Singtel Data Usage. No points for creativity with the name but I thought it’d be nice to know exactly what the app did from just reading its name. After one keyword rejection (which was unfounded but I wasn’t going to argue with the app reviewers), it finally got approved a few days ago.

Yeah that’s what it looks like. I stole part of the design from another iPhone app – can anyone guess which one? I think I spent 80% of development time changing the design over and over again, tweaking font sizes, and agonizing over which icons to use.

Thanks to folks on Twitter (I’m @chuyeow – do follow me if you’re reading my blog), word got around and by the 3rd day of it being approved, my app was the Top Free app on the Singapore App Store. Going to take a time out for the vanity shot:

A similar app, iBBOM, was approved around the same time but I believe I got a head start because of all the awesome people on Twitter who retweeted my tweet and the kind folks who gave glowing reviews on the App Store (thanks especially to Andy Croll for the 1st review). iBBOM actually looks much better than my app (I can’t help tweeting about it) and works perfectly (only thing I don’t like are the ads). I believe I couldn’t have gotten to the top of the App Store without the guys and gals who spread the word on Twitter.

On to the not so fun part of this post. Yet another similar app, SG BBOM, was pulled from the App Store by Singtel (the telco) recently so I’m expecting to hear from Singtel really soon. We shall see.

In the meantime, if you own an iPhone and have a Singtel data plan, do check out my app (App Store link) and give an honest review on the App Store. If you’ve already downloaded it, I’d like to know what you think in a review as well. Thanks!

My setup is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with 256MB RAM hosted at SliceHost and this blog is served off Nginx and PHP FastCGI processes to handle PHP scripts. The wonderful (because it just works and is really easy to setup) WP-Cache WordPress plugin keeps a cache of pages that’s swept at logical times (i.e. whenever there are any updates or comments).

I may be a Rails/merb fanboy, but this awesome piece of blog software that can stand up to the Digg Effect with ease is great. WordPress FTW!

I would say I’m a pretty heavy Google Reader user, checking my several hundred subscriptions several times a day, so it was pretty distressing. I posted a thread at the Google Reader Google Group (the link doesn’t work now because they’ve moved the Google Group somewhere else for some reason) and several other people responded that they were seeing the same weirdness.

I had the same problem, and here’s the really weird part: I got YOUR feeds! If you look at the top of the page you can see the account you’re supposedly logged in with. Well, I saw your account there. And this was before I read this message. I also saw some other names every so often. Right now it says email censored.

Maybe it’s some weird mix up with the ISP. Do you use SingNet?

Some time later I started seeing other people’s accounts:

The problem affected only Singnet (a major local ISP) users in Singapore (about 7 other users in Singapore using Singnet responded with the same problems). No one really knew what the problem was and neither the Google Reader team nor Singnet (someone sent them an email) responded.

My guess was Singnet started caching Google Reader at a proxy and somehow managed to bypass all the credentials that was needed to modify any feed subscriptions. Sounds like a pretty nasty security bug to me.

The aftermath:

• Google Reader no longer has my feed subscriptions (I didn’t manage to recover them so it’s still in the sad state of having only 1 feed subscription to some UK property shite).
• I’ve manually rebuilt my OPML file (containing my feed subscriptions).
• I’m now using NewsFire. It’s not decentralized so I can’t sync it between machines, which really sucks since I have 2 primary machines, but I’m wary of using online feed readers right now.
• I regularly export my OPML file and check it into Subversion.
• I’m looking for a reliable decentralized feed reader once again (having used Bloglines and of course, Google Reader prior to the catastrophe).

Some of the features are pretty cool, most of them are mundane. For me, I am really looking forward to:

• the new Finder – Finder sucks so bad as a file system interface. I use Path Finder, which incidentally had an upgrade recently to 4.7. The new Finder looks pretty (Cover Flow for files, sexy!) but what I’m really hoping for is a Finder with which you can actually be productive.
• Ruby and Rails baked right into Mac OS X – while installing Rails and upgrading Ruby is a breeze on Mac OS X as it is right now, having these installed by default is pretty sweet. Even Capistrano will be included. Now, how one upgrades Ruby is another thing though…
• Time Machine – Even though I already own a licensed copy of SuperDuper!, I’m still eager to use Time Machine. I mean, who isn’t hooked on the time travel metaphor yet? It’s like System Restore done right (with the advantage of hindsight, of course).

What are you looking forward in Leopard?

While trying to install Rmagick on my spanking, new, glossy, kakkoii MacBook, MacPorts reported a checksum error with the ImageMagick source tarball:

Target com.apple.checksum returned: Unable to verify file checksums

At first, I thought it was an outdated portfile but even after a sudo port selfupdate and sudo port -d sync, the checksum error was still occurring (checksum of the file: 4bcb4264c2170fe562b10a732f43e7af, expected checksum in the portfile: 9469ce1b1b645f8c728158cc434b0ff8).

Turns out, the first listed master site (where MacPorts gets its source files from), http://imagemagick.linux-mirror.org/download/ is hosting a source tarball with a bad checksum. Digging around the man page for port a bit, and switching the order of the master source sites solved it, so it was just a case of a bad file on one of the mirror sites.

sudo port edit imagemagick to edit the portfile and change the source mirror to a legit one. You should see something like this:

master_sites \
  http://imagemagick.linux-mirror.org/download/ \
  http://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/ImageMagick/ \
  sourceforge:imagemagick \
  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.net/pub/${name}/ \
  ftp://ftp.fifi.org/pub/ImageMagick/ \
  ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/${name}/

Just move an alternative master_site to the top of the list (I used the SourceForge one). There probably is a way to specify the master_site on the command line with port install but I’ve had just about enough of reading man pages and the now nearly unfindable MacPorts documentation (whatever happened to the old Darwin Ports site that had great documentation?)

Anyway, I’ve written to the webmaster of the mirror site linux-mirror.org, so this would probably be fixed for all two of you who are gonna be installing ImageMagick via MacPorts within these few days or so. Still, it was a good exercise in debugging bad port installations.

What’s IDLE? Well, quoting myself:

Simply put, IDLE is a command that allows IMAP email servers to transmit updates to the client in real time. This saves the client from having to continuously poll the server to achieve the effect of new mail appearing immediately. All in all, an exceptionally useful command that saves Thunderbird the work of polling IMAP servers continuously.

So anyway, it’s really simple to install and use (just simple checkboxes for enabling IDLE for your IMAP accounts).

Remember to configure Mail to stop polling these mail accounts every X minutes or so now. Enjoy the geeky feeling of knowing you’ve just saved several CPU cycles and a few kilobytes of bandwidth.

Mac OS X users, if you watch videos in full screen mode (like I do most of the time), you’d be delighted to know that they added a full screen controller à la the video player in iTunes:

That was one of my pet peeves with VLC when I was still using Windows as my main desktop OS, and I’d stayed true to Media Player Classic right to the point where I switched to OS X. Media Player Classic is Windows-only, so I had to switch to VLC as well (QuickTime player never impressed me and I wasn’t willing to pay for the Pro version). The lack of a full controller in full screen mode and the inability to move to specific spots in the video timeline with sufficient granularity seems to have been fixed with this new full screen controller panel.

And while they still haven’t made it possible to pause a video by clicking on the video output (which was the case in Media Player Classic), I’ve mostly compensated for it by hitting the space bar. Now that they’ve added a right-click context menu to the video output screen, the same can be done but in 2 clicks with just the mouse – not optimal but it does feel better to see a context menu pop up when right-clicking. I guess that’s the Windows user in me talking – I still feel that almost everything I see should have a context menu or it just feels wrong.

Oh and they added support for the Apple Remote Control. Works great, I just have to remember to take out my remote control and use it next time I’m sitting back watching a movie or anime.

If you are a Mac user you’d probably have heard of the much-hyped MacHeist. (I bet non-Mac users were probably annoyed with the coverage of MacHeist at some point on sites like Digg.) Even I was late to join up with MacHeist because of its “I’m not gonna tell you what it’s about but it’s gonna rock your world” press and the oh-so-exclusive invite system (which is surprisingly rather effective despite being probably the most used viral “marketing technique”) – I got into the whole MacHeist thing courtesy of the registration link posted over at TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog). (Oh and yes, I do know that by blogging about it I’ve fallen prey to the MacHeist hype, but I can’t help myself. Or maybe I just need to blog something that’s easy to write about.)

And so I signed up, and after being completely muddled about what this MacHeist thing is all about, came upon a mission briefing with a very well-done voiceover (love that voice, sounds just right). Turns out MacHeist is a detective (or insert snooping, heist-related adjective here) game where you (try to) accomplish missions and get “loot” in return.

Not what I’d expected, and I almost didn’t play along until I checked out the MacHeist forums (requires a MacHeist account) and saw that the sheer volume of activity. A few thousand posts in a couple of hundred topics may not look like a lot, but it’s pretty amazing for what I assume is a small user base (invite-only system) and you always have to remember MacHeist is really only a week old or so.

Now that got my attention again. Lurking around the forums a bit, I found general praise of the “loot” from completing Mission One. And turns out the “loot” is a bunch of free Mac software, which I really should have guessed. “Free”, “legitimate”, “Mac software” – ze Mac lover in me cannot resist! I went back, re-read Mission One, and sent out an email to what I hoped was an automated email bot (it would be disturbing if someone was actually replying to all the MacHeist emails) in an attempt to dig out what I was told were much-coveted iPhone specs. It was fun for a while trying to convince the email bot to send me what I needed, but it got old when I had to, you know, get the damn answer without running in circles (with circular email).

Lurking around the forums more when I got stuck, I came across this stickied Official Mission #1 Thread and it was all easy mode from there. So yes, the answers are all there if you’re lazy or impatient (I am both).

After completing the mission, you get the combination code to your safe, where you can find the fruits of your labor, loot! Well, about the reward, I have to say I was disappointed – perhaps I was expecting something like free licenses of TextMate or Parallels, or even Disco (though I have actually purchased licenses for all 3 – this Mac thing is turning me into someone who actually buys software – the horror!). Anyway, the rewards were full copies of Chat Transcript Manager, Assignment Planner, and Soulver. Two out of three applications for students… I got Soulver to play with its gimmicky maths functionality, didn’t bother with the rest (not to put them down, but personally don’t have any use for Chat Transcript Manager being a full-time Adium user nor for Assignment Planner).

Despite the anti-climax, I really think the MacHeist guys have done an awesome job (they got me for sure – I’m already anticipating the next heist and more loot!). It’s an excellent way to promote Mac software (some of the lesser known products as well), and to get people talking. I can imagine they aren’t doing too shabby with ad placements and sponsorship. And really, that’s a damn polished setup they have there with the missions. Oh and before I end this post, if you need an invite, let me know (just leave a comment), still have 4 to give out. Well, if the registration link posted over at TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) no longer works that is.

So I was rather pleased when I saw someone had created a simple application (preference pane, rather) called StartupSound.prefPane that allows you to control the startup volume or mute it completely.

Intel Mac owners take note: I grabbed version 1.1b1 of StartupSound.prefPane off the MacUpdate page for StartupSound.prefPane though, as I noticed it said “StartupSound.prefPane now works on an Intel-based Mac” for that version. Wouldn’t want to try the stable release version (1.0.4) since it’s for PowerPC-based Macs.

You can get CM4 skins from cmskins.com.