Notes From Andy

I just found out how to drastically shorten the delay between closing my laptop and seeing the pulsing “sleep” light:

[W]hen my Mac goes to sleep I have to wait for it to write most of the 4 GB of RAM to disk. A fellow engineer just showed me a faster way to make the Mac sleep [...].

Like Mike, I like to be sure my laptop is actually sleeping before slipping it into my bag so it doesn’t run down my battery or dangerously overheat. I just did a quick test, and this tip reduced my wait time from over 40 seconds to about five. That long wait really detracted from the feeling of having an on-the-go machine.

I save frequently and compulsively, so I’m not worried about losing data if I accidentally let the battery run down, which is pretty rare. It usually happens precisely because I didn’t didn’t have the patience to check that the laptop was really sleeping, though a couple of times it was because I had unknowingly jostled the lid open while it was in my bag. The biggest pain about losing my RAM state would be waiting for my dozens of browser windows to reload, but I seem to be doing that regularly anyway when Firefox suddenly decides to get flaky.

I also plan to check out SmartSleep, mentioned in the comments.

(Via Ranchero.)

There’s now a sneakypeeks page for AppKiDo.

I hurriedly posted download links on cocoa-dev three days ago. Today I updated the web site.

Release notes:

• This is a bug-fix release, not the faster-loading version I promised earlier (that version will be 0.99).
• Now that the iPhone NDA has been lifted, AppKiDo-for-iPhone is available. It is a separate app with a very slightly different icon. Also, the AppKiDo source code is again available. I don’t think it contains anything all that secret, but I wanted to be on the safe side.
• Added nil checks to prevent some of the crashes that were reported in 0.981.
• Some docs weren’t showing up — for example, NSIndexPath UIKit Additions and UITextField’s delegate methods.
• The “Classes with delegates” quicklist was missing classes that have a delegate property as opposed to an explicit setDelegate: method.
• Fixed the Spaces bug where a new window would be created every time you switch to the space containing AppKiDo.
• Known issue: a few deprecated methods show up in “Delegate Methods” section — for example, [NSData deserializeAlignedBytesLengthAtCursor:].

The subway station near my office is almost completely filled with these “I’m a PC” posters — I’d say twenty of them at least:

It seems to me they’re just begging for someone to do this:

(I did this with Create. No actual ads were harmed in the making of this blog post.)

I fixed a couple of AppKiDo bugs and added some defensive code that might fix the crashes a couple of people have been having. Will release 0.982 soon.