XClarify pro 3.1 review.

Just a quick announcement about me and my work after another quiet period of several months.

I’ve been neglecting this blog for much of the (now) past year. So it may not seem like it, but 2013 was eventful year for me…

Finally set foot to update the look and feel of the website. There were several issues with previous layout that I wanted to solve, and I think most of them are met with the new look and underlying rendering engine.

I neglected the blog for a while… I have a couple of ideas for posts, but other things keep jumping in. In any case, this is not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to start 2013 with 2.2 release of Startupizer which was sent to Mac App Store review team on january 9th. It only took about a week to enter review, however in a day or so I received rejection note. It’s not the first rejection I got, but this one is more serious; if I want to correct it, the core feature of Startupizer - managing login items - will stop working. It’s unfortunate consequence of the app sandbox.

With all the reports of how much iOS6 maps are worse than they were on iOS5, I though I’d share my experience with the new version, based on my usage from the last few days.

Appledoc became quite popular amongs Cocoa developers, especially since 2.0. It also seen many contributions from various users. But it has become very hard to maintain. In this blog post I’ll describe the reasons and future directions.

One more year is nearing to its end and it’s time to review the ups and downs. I’ll take a look at how the year went by, what was going on as well as plans for next one.

In June, we wrote about our new website look. Some time after that, Matt Gemmell wrote a blog post about “baked” web sites. The concept wasn’t new to us, but the post was published right in the middle of the time when we were playing with local Word Press installation, and due to unnecessary difficulties with the process, it resonated in our mind.

Gentle Bytes site has new look! This post talks about the changes and reasons for them.

Every software has a story behind it and so does Startupizer. In this post, we’ll write about the store behind the Startupizer - from the idea to launching in the Mac App Store!

Handling support and feedback is probably one of the most important things software developer teams face after releasing a product. The simplest way many of us use at the start is e-mail, but that soon becomes too difficult to manage. There are several online solutions available - FogBugz, Lighthouse or it’s “bigger” sister Tender are just few of those most often mentioned by developers.

There are many applications we find invaluable and rely on them for our daily usage. In this post, we’ll write about some of them. Note that our selection of apps reflects our personal needs and tastes and this post is primarily intended to give tribute to these tools and perhaps show various options to our readers. We’re sure many of you have your own personal favorites and many of those would be different from ours. Keep this in mind when reading the article. This post will only cover generic utility apps, we won’t write about apps we use for developing - perhaps we’ll cover them in a future post…

Those of you who follow me on Twitter already know that I was using MGTemplateEngine for generating appledoc html files. I tweaked it a bit to make it work for me – the main point was to add ability of function-like sections that can be called with arbitrary parameters.

Some weeks ago my late 2007 MacBook Pro 15” started having issues during boot – it presented gray Apple logo with a bar graph underneath which went somewhere near 1/4th the way two times and then the computer would just turn off without any warning. I immediately checked various forums and tried all suggestions, but nothing worked. Luckily I had my Tech Tool Pro 5 DVD ready so I booted with it and performed all bunch of tests, even waited an hour for HD bad sectors search, however no problem whatsoever was reported. I also performed volume rebuild, restarted and voila – OS X booted (still preceded with gray bar graph though). Once there, I ran Disk Utility to repair permissions and it didn’t report any problem.