sudo rm -f /private/var/log/asl/*

via Shannon Hicks

We launched our second app in the AppStore yesterday, My High Street, and today it’s #17 in the UK AppStore!! (in the Navigation category).  We’re really happy with this amazing result, and not even sure how it happened, to be honest.

Perhaps handing out flyers at Geek ‘N Rolla had something to do with it

Congrats to the Shelton bros. for the design work, and to Dmitri and A2 – apparently Dmitri will have a site soon

NB: follow us on Twitter: @myhighstreet

My High Street

Aside from great performance with Google apps/products, I’m looking forward to per-tab performance monitoring, I always get one tab that kills my whole Safari instance, have to re-start, put all the windows back in their respective spaces, PITA.

I received confirmation of my original application a few days later on Feb 7th, 2009, then just today March 4th I got a phone call saying that I had been accepted.  That was following a number of forms being filled, my company incorporation certificate being faxed over, and a few chasing emails.  And a month of waiting!  Somehow I thought it would be faster but reading around it seems about average these days.

But the whole process I’ve found suprisingly bumpy – there are many aspects that could be improved.

First you get an email titled Iphone Development Program Enrollment Status which invites you to click on a link leading to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.  After that’s done you’re invited to pay $99 to sign up to the program, then you receive an email that invites you to look at your electronic download, which in fact turns out to be nothing you can download.

The trick, pointed out in the above-mentioned site, is you must then wait up to 24 hours, then you login to the Iphone Developer site, then in the top right corner you’ll see a link which indicates you can start the process of setting up your developer certificate.

One little email explaining the process would have been very welcome guys :-/

UPDATE: a full 24 hours later, I got the iPhone Developer Program Activation Code email, but even with this there was more funny business.  You are invited to click on the link in the email to activate your account, then you are taken to a page that says, “check your email for a confirmation code that you need to paste into the form field below”.

That email never came, however the form field was pre-populated with a code that in my case worked.

For some reason the Mac usability guys decided that showing just the time, and date on one click, was more usable.

There are a lot of tutorials about how to customise this and generally each one has around 50 comments, the thing is none of them work without a black magic hack that can usually be discovered around comment #47.  

If you don’t select the format medium and don’t include the seconds (even though they won’t show up) the formatting does not work.

I found this tutorial one of the more helpful ones, and after trial and error discovered the seconds problem.

So Mac users can now take advantage of all the OS X integration features of iCal, and still have their data up to date in their Google Calendar account, which they probably obliged to use at work to share data with non-Mac colleagues.   Two way synching is supported, so enter your event in either source and moments later the other one gets it.  And maybe you have 10 or so Google calendars, no probs, you can add them all to iCal.

Great to hear this news as I was just on the edge of paying $25 for the un-named commercial product that also manages similar synchronisation.  

And if you’re really keen you can setup a mobile me account, so any dates entered in your iPhone 3G also get synched to your iCal and Google calendars.  I guess it won’t be long before your iPhone senses that it’s lunchtime, knows your location and schedule, and suggests a list of highly rated Indian restaurants in your area, knowing what cuisine you love

On the linux desktop I used meld for years and miss it greatly.  It’s simple and effective and doesn’t do any more than is required.  I also spent a record amount of time trying to get this package to compile on OS X, something like 2 days once.  Would love to see a screenshot of someone who has it running  Current solution is to launch Parallels and run meld in Fedora, very painful ..

And please don’t suggest FileMerge.app, this program is really anemic compared to meld.

• voodoo fix #1: the most widely “documented” fix is to launch /Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup.app and change the properties for built-in output from the default 44khz, to 96khz, then back to 44 – doesn’t work
• voodoo fix #2: this one I like, launch Garage Band and the audio prob will be fixed, nada
• the fix that works: delete the ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia folder

Above prob occurs with latest software at the time of writing, btw:

• Safari 3.1.1
• Firefox, latest
• OS X 10.5.2
• Flash 9.0.124.0 – test your version

Update: this problem just happened to me again, using OS X 10.5.8 and Safari 4.0.3.  Again, use the fix that works, restart Safari and problem fixed.