Michael Lopp:

The positive feedback an engineer receives in the Zone is the sensation that you literally performed magic. From the complete problem set in your mind combined with your weapons-grade focus, you build a thing that you immediately recognize as disproportionately valuable. And you see this value instantaneously - that’s the high.

I’ve never found the right words to describe what it’s like to build software. Now I know it:

I am addicted. And I seek my next high.

Michael Lopp about the importance of design skills in engineering:

My opinion is that the choice to spread the usability design function across the engineering team was intended to send a clear message: engineer and designer need to party more… together.

Understanding the language of design is an important skill when developing an application. His article includes a list of useful books to get an engineer started.

Fraser Speirs explains iOS Multitasking.

Dan Benjamin on The Talk Show #70:

Last Night my wife looks up and says: I hate this new Address Book in Lion.

…

Look at iCal! iCal sucks now.

Couldn’t agree more.

When I switched to a Mac I needed a way to get software which wasn’t included, or was oudated, on a default OS X installation. Over the years I’ve used Fink, MacPorts and now Homebrew, and all of them served me well. But there was one thing that bugged me:

I always forgot to check for updates of the installed software.

OS X system software will be updated by softwareupdate. Third-party software widely uses Sparkle or something similar, if they aren’t installed from the App Store. softwareupdate, Sparkle, and the App Store automatically notify me if there are any updates. Homebrew does not. I had to check it manually.

I was annoyed that I always forgot to update the Homebrew formulae, that I wrote a simple launchd agent - brewupdate. brewupdate checks for new and updated formulae every day at 11 AM and redirects the output of the brew command to /var/log/system.log. The output can than be easily viewed in Console (/Applications/Utilities/Console.app).

If you use homebrew and want to benefit from automatic formulae updates, try out brewupdate.