Supporting Leopard while developing in Snow Leopard

Apparently Apple’s Cocoa method availability documentation is not enough to determine whether something will work on an earlier version of Mac OS X. That is, avoiding 10.6-only methods doesn’t ensure that your application will also work flawlessly in 10.5. As a first-time Mac developer programming an application on Snow Leopard that is also targeted for…

Saving Quartz Composition for distribution

Today I learned a very important lesson when saving Quartz Composer composition files for use in other machines: always save the composition as a flat file. Even though according to Wikipedia that quartz composer version 4.0 saves virtual patches in the composition as a fallback, the composition may not run properly if it isn’t saved…

Looks like Snow Leopard is the new Vista

If John Hodgman (the PC guy) doesn’t work for Apple, I guess he’d be saying this to Justin Long (the Mac guy) PC: Hi, I heard that Snow Leopard is having crashing issues. Mac: Yeah, you’re right. Safari crashes randomly and XCode crashes persistently. PC: Seems like you’re having a bad Vista day. Wanna get Windows…

Synchronizing Nokia N9300 with Mac OS X Tiger

Not too long ago I’ve updated my mom’s laptop to the last version of Tiger, 10.4.11 and recently I found out that iSync failed to synchronize my mom’s Nokia 9300 phone. The phone’s connection is still set-up but there was an “x” on top of the phone’s icon in iSync’s window. As I remember, initially…

Speech Timer for Public Speakers

This post was originally written for iPhone App Index. In my day job (yes, I still have one and no, writing iPhone apps doesn’t make you filthy rich) we have an in-house Toastmasters club where I’m a member in. Toastmasters is a kind of special interest groups where the members practice public speaking, which is typically…