You can read about some of my initial reactions to the iPhone SDK announcement today over at Mactropolis.com.

Summary - yay!

Update: Enthusiasm dampened - the developer program is only open to U.S. residence for now. That means no running applications on the actual device for me, only the simulator (which basically means it’s next to impossible to develop any accelerometer-based applications). The reasons for this restriction are not entirely clear to me, iPod Touches are available worldwide.

Peter N Lewis:

The Leopard Dock shows folders as a layer of icons, which is crazy for folders as you cannot easily recognize a folder based on its contents. Especially crazy when the folders have recognizable icons already!

Of course, here at Stairways we prefer to find solutions to problems rather than just grumble, so here is a trivial solution. Simply create an alias to the folder, name it to sort as the first icon, and put it in the folder.

(Via Stairways Software, via Daring Fireball.)

Another option is to do what I’ve been doing with my main projects folder and just store the alias itself in the dock. This restores the ability to click the Dock icon to open a Finder window, which is what I want for this folder - the Stacks preview of the folder is a hindrance for me in this case. The downside is that you have to store an alias somewhere on your disk just for this purpose.

Well, time machine looks really cool, but I guess I’ll never know?

There are 2 big problems with this error message. First, it gives me no hint as to why the update could not be completed (bad destination? Some kind of file permissions error?), and second it gives me no suggestions as to what I can do to fix the problem.

The Time machine preference pane wasn’t any more informative (after clicking the helpful red “i” button”):

Hopefully using SuperDuper! to make nightly backups to a different partition on the same drive will continue to work under Leopard!

Update: Time Machine now seems to be working with no errors. Still don’t know what was going on, but a backup just finished.

After installing Leopard on my main machine, nearly everything seems to be working fine, except for one essential application, Mail Act-On. It’s disabled by Leopard when Mail is launched. Back in the OS 9 days I used Eudora, and it had an option (command-J I believe) to run rules on the selected messages. Rules themselves could be specified to run on incoming messages, outgoing messages, or when activated with the shortcut or menu option.

Since Mail.app doesn’t have similar options for rules (the only option is to have the rules act on incoming messages), I use Mail Act-On to achieve a similar result. I set up all of my Act-On rules to respond to the same keystroke ( ` then 1 ), which files the selected messages away into their respective folders. I suppose I could make the move to using one giant archive folder and use smart folders to generate the folders I need, but I’ve been using my current system for years now, and with my rules set up, using a keystroke to move messages to a specific folder is just as easy and time efficient for me.

Anyway, my point is that Mail Act-On has become essential to my workflow, even if I’m not using it quite the way it was intended. Luckily, the developer seems to be on top of things.

From the forums on Indev.ca, “smorr” says:

MAO is basically good to go but one needs to install MAO open terminal and type
defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3

This seems to be working great for me so far. He also mentions that he expects to release a fully Leopard-compatible release soon. Looks like it’s time for me to hit that “Donate” button! I can’t believe he’s giving this software away for free!

Well, the details on the $100 iPhone rebate are here - looks like a pretty easy process for most people:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/storecredit/

However, if you’re like me, and live outside of the US, the elation of finally getting your phone working on a non-AT&T GSM network might be slightly dampened. According to the fine print on the above page:

(7) iPhones registered to customers whose addresses are outside the United States

*sigh* At least I got mine refurbished!

A while ago I must have signed up for some Apple announcement list, because lately I have been getting more annoucements about apple products than, well, than someone who didn’t sign up for the accouncement list I guess.

One I got today I thought was a little funny though, the subject is “The new MacBook. Knows all the hot spots.” Seems to me that with people complaining about how hot the new laptops are, you might not want to use the words “hot spots” too much in your advertising. Of course the email itself is talking about wireless hot spots and how easy it is to connect using a MacBook.