I should have more time in the coming months, although from my point of view, the less I blog, the busier I must be !

I guess the point of a blog is to start a discussion, but the spam to genuine ratio is far too high towards the spam side. If you have a question, comment or suggestion, get my contact details off the main site. Always happy to talk, or better yet ping me on Twitter. My name is @kiwibastard.

I’ve been pretty busy with other things, including publishing an app for the iPhone. (Note to self: change the urls for that…) and with the impending arrival of child number two, I haven’t been keeping up with the rumours. So this year all of my predictions will be completely off the cuff. So here goes (in no particular order):

1) Update to iLife and iWork – it’s been almost a year and a half for iWork and at least a year for iLife so they are due
2) Mac Mini / AppleTV refresh. Both are due for either a cut or a revamp. I can’t see too much happening with the ATV as it’s pretty much a hobby sideline for Apple. It would be nice to see a Mini upgrade with more ram and CPU bump. It would be great to see a mini with some kind of ATV integration, although again can’t see it
3) Refresh to iMac line up. This could just be a CPU and Video bump, but maybe a refinement of the design. Although, IMHO they are spot on as it is. I can guarantee this one because I bought a new iMac about 3 months ago!

I think the above will happen in some shape or form. The next list is things that could happen, but probably won’t, or ones I want to happen…

1) iTablet. This would be computing nirvana for me if this happened. I can’t see Apple announcing this outside of an Apple run event. The current financial climate might not be the place for this kind of device either
2) Mac App Store: Like the iPhone app store but for Mac Apps. I want this as a (sometimes) indie developer rather than an end user, but it would be awesome for all concerned. The only issue would be the bottom dweller price trend could continue for Mac apps – apps selling for less than they should because some developers put their apps at too low a price
3) Apple to announce an across the board dropping of prices by 20% due to current economic climate.

Well that’s it. Will report back with my hit and miss rate.

If you need to split an NSString into an NSArray it can be done:

NSString madeUpText = @"bob, dick, jane, harry, bruce";
NSArray *splitArray = [madeUpText componentsSeparatedByString: @","];

This is especially useful if you have a list of strings from say the NSPasteboard that are separated by newline. In this example you would go:

value = [pasteBoard stringForType:NSStringPboardType];
NSArray *fileList = [value componentsSeparatedByString:@"\n"];

where value is an NSString * and pasteBoard is [NSPasteboard generalPasteboard]

• On a census, you put Jedi as your religion
• You have installed and used Linux recently. +5 points for using a hands on distro like Gentoo. +10 for doing it all by hand.
• You have a blog and have a list of blogs you read daily
• You’ve had more computers than girlfriends/boyfriends
• You have a favourite Star Trek captain.
• You consider numbers like 32, 256, 1024 to be nice round numbers
• You wear shorts in the middle of winter
• You know what a code monkey is(and who sung it)
• You are tech support for your family
• None of your family really understand what you do all day at work
• You own or have built your own light sabre

Not an exhaustive list by any means. Any other items to add? Leave a comment.

For example, in the image above the Navigation Title is quite long, so having the Title of the previous view instead of Back causes things to get a little busy.

To change the text or style you have to add a custom UIBarButtonItem to the previous or owner’s navigation item. That is the NavigationController before the current View on the stack. This is a little puzzling until you think about it a little bit. 

The code to add you own custom item is as follows:

UIBarItem *backBar = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithTitle:@”Back” style:UIBarButtonItemStyleDone target:nil action:nil];

self.navigationItem.backBarButtonItem = backBar;

[backBar release];

// following code pushes a new view on to the stack


[[self navigationController] pushViewController:self.goodFormViewController animated:YES];

The resulting code will look like this:

1) Delete all files in /user/{username}/Documents/RDC Connections

2) Don’t fill in the domain text box for some reason when using the Mac client if the domain text box is filled then the Windows machine at the other end can’t authenticate the connection. Seems to be worse with Vista, but I have read of this happening with 2003 also.

HTH

Congrats Tim. I look forward to seeing more games from IMS in the coming months.