Mac

I’ve been using a second generation MacBook for a little over a year now, and in many ways I love it. The performance is good enough most of the time, and the portability has helped me get a lot more done because of how easy it is to carry the MacBook and use it in a variety of places.

All that said, I had enough performance and stability issues that I was eager to upgrade when the third generation model was announced at WWDC. While I have no issues upgrading my iPhone every year, it’s been very unusual for me to want to upgrade a Mac that often. I decided to try the MacBook Escape¹ alongside the latest MacBook because I want to be sure I’ll still be happy with my Mac this time next year.

I’ve recently been working on an iPhone application that integrates with Blogger, and as such I have gotten some experience with the GData Objective-C Client Library. The issues below were all encountered while working with the GDataServiceGoogleBlogger service, but they should apply to the other GData services too.

Being a heavy Eclipse user, I’ve grown accustomed to its keyboard shortcuts for moving and copying lines of text. Xcode doesn’t have a regular editing command for this, but it does offer similar functionality via user scripts. The Move Line Up and Move Line Down scripts are already there, just waiting for you to bind keys to them. Go to the script menu, which is to the left of the Help menu, and select the Edit User Scripts… menu item. Expand the disclosure triangle next to Text, and you can set keyboard shortcuts by double-clicking in the column to the right of the script names. Below is a screenshot of what the dialog will look like if you follow all of the instructions in this post.

I finally spent some quality time with Xcode this past weekend. While I haven’t done any real work with it yet, I think it should be a serviceable IDE. The current version of Xcode at the time of this writing is 3.2.3, and it can be downloaded for free from Apple. You do have to register an account if you don’t have one yet, but you don’t have to pay anything until you want to join the iPhone Developer Program. You can’t actually install anything on a mobile device until you subscribe, which mainly gives you a one year certificate that you use to sign your applications.