First, you need to enable the Japanese QWERTY keyboard. From the home screen, go to Settings > General > Keyboard > International Keyboards. Now scroll to Japanese, tap it and switch on the QWERTY keyboard.

Now fire up Notes and make a new note, or edit an existing one. Press the globe button at the bottom left of the keyboard to switch over to the Japanese keyboard.

Then type a character — doesn’t really matter which one — and immediately press the globe again to switch back to your default keyboard. The rest of this note will be beautifully typeset in Helvetica.

I love tiny little details, even if they’re not ever intended to be seen by the public.

The screenshot above is one I took in Need for Speed: Most Wanted (while looking backwards). What I find interesting in this is the detail written on the cardboard box texture on the left.

The sticker in the top left reads:

“A whole bunch of stuff, there is no way you’ll be able to read this once it’s reduced.”

Well apparently it wasn’t reduced enough.

Even more interesting is what is ‘printed’ and obscured below. It’s a story:

“Andy [obscured] mountain bike were climbing up a hill when all of a sudden a little turtle jumped right in his way. Andy didn’t want to run over the poor turtle so he stopped, picked it up and [obscured] it down the mountain. What a nice guy that Andy is.”

Programmer’s sense of humour? Easter egg based on a true story?

What I love about these little details, the tiny easter eggs that no-one is really meant to look at, is that it shows the humanity and humour behind a massive project like a modern video game.

A dual keyboard setup! Unnecessary? Perhaps. But it does prevent you from straining if you are typing ‘at’ something on the second monitor, which you want to look at whilst typing.

It’s also useful if you want to have something open for reference and glancing at up on the white MacBook screen (*cough* Twitter *cough*). Just don’t need to type anything on that machine. And if you do, you hook up the wired Apple keyboard to that machine instead.

I just pushed out an update for DfontSplitter for Mac. The application now features:

• Automatic software update support via Sparkle
• New preferences window
• You can choose whether a Finder window is opened after conversion from the Preferences window
• New progress indicator while the Convert button is pressed and fondu is working

You can download the release from the (newly prettified) DfontSplitter project page. Enjoy!

Tweetie for Mac was released today, to much fanfare. Its interface on the iPhone is absolutely top notch (I happily paid the £1.79 for my iPod Touch) and the Mac interface also looks interesting as well.

I’m not going to go into a full review, because I really haven’t used it much yet. What I don’t want this post to come across as, however, is a rejection of it totally. There are just a couple of issues relating to privacy I have with this initial release.

SSL Connections

UPDATE: As of Tweetie 1.0.1, which was released minutes ago, this issue is fixed. Consider this paragraph obsolete.

For some reason, Tweetie for Mac does not send your Twitter username and password over a secure HTTPS connection. Quite frankly, I’ve come to expect this in any Twitter client. It surely takes no extra effort to implement this, it has a minimal performance overhead and even if you don’t really need it, does it really hurt to encrypt your password?

This really bugs me. I don’t really want to be throwing my credentials across the network in plain text every few minutes. It’s like shouting out your Twitter username and password to everyone in the street. Sure, probably no-one cares, but why do it if you don’t have to?

Advertising and the Lack of a Privacy Policy

UPDATE: I contacted Fusion Ads on this subject recently and as of this morning, 2009-04-23, the Tweetie for Mac page has been updated with a brief, but better-than-nothing privacy statement. I’m still interested in seeing something a bit more substantial, but this is a good step forward.

Tweetie for Mac costs $14.95 at the moment, going up to $19.95 later on. To get people to try it, there’s a free ad supported version, using ads provided by a company called Fusion Ads.

What alarms me is not the fact that it is ad-supported, or even that I’ve never heard of that ad company before today (although the latter is a little bit of an issue). The problem for me is that I can’t find a privacy policy detailing how this ad system works, what information it collects on you and what it does with that information.

It concerns me quite a lot that in a desktop application, where an advertising system can get a lot more information about you than it can within the constraints of a web browser environment, nothing is said about what is going on.

I have emailed the contact address on the Fusion Ads site asking where I can find a privacy policy, voicing this concern and asking them to make it more prominent if there is one. I will update this post when I get a reply.

Two Showstoppers

For me, these two issues stop me from using the client right now. I’m sure the SSL issue will be addressed in a future release if enough people ask for it, as I can’t imagine it being difficult to implement at all. It would also be nice to have a little bit of transparency in how the free model works as well, and hopefully this will come with time as well.

For the time being, however, I’m not entirely satisfied that I can use the app comfortably, so I am holding off for now.

Nothing too exciting, unfortunately, just a bugfix release for a bug which would cause the ajax URLs of a tab not to work if they contained an extra ‘/’ character. This bug was a problem with a regular expression used to append a timestamp variable to the ajax URL (which itself is a fix for a bug with IE caching).

As always, you can download the script from the SleekTabs project page or from its home on PHP Classes.

Yesterday my brand new MacBook Pro 15″ arrived.

I got my original white MacBook over two years ago and it quickly became my primary machine. The seamlessness of the Apple hardware-software connection, its increased performance over my existing Linux PC and the desire to learn about OS X motivated this. Since then it has been, for the most part, my primary computer.

The MacBook still is an excellent machine for what it does, but being a full-time desktop as well as a portable computer, I began to desire a larger screen for when I’m using it at the desk and to get away from the limitation of the rather pathetic Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics.

So to address these issues and erm… continue my investment into computing (nothing to do with the fact that the new Pros are just, really, nice) I went out and bought the new 15″ MacBook Pro.

I got the middle model, with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and the dual GPU Nvidia GeForce 9400M (for battery life) and Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT 512 MB (for performance).

I’ve had it just hours, but I love this machine!

The aluminium construction feels so much more solid than the white MacBook’s multiple bits of plastic. It feels like a complete unit; significantly more robust. I know I sound like Apple’s marketing material here, but it really does. Between the plastic and the aluminium, there is just a world of difference in the feel of the product in your hand.

The LED display is also absolutely top notch. Compared to the two year old display in the MacBook, the brightness is much higher, the colours are much more intense and the glossy coating makes the screen look absolutely gorgeous. The extra screen space compared to the 13″ MacBook is pretty nice too.

The trackpad does take a little bit of getting used to, but the surface is markedly more smooth than the MacBook. The clicking anywhere on the trackpad is almost disconcerting at first and does mean that you have to learn how to drag a little difference, but I must admit I am quickly getting used to, and preferring, the new.

There are also little incremental things that were good in the MacBook, but just that little bit better in this new Pro. The keyboard, for example, retains the same keyboard design, with separate keys each protruding individually from the body. They have a different finish, however and the tactile feedback from the keys as you type is a little more subtle and smooth, very much the same as the standalone aluminium keyboard that ships with the iMac. The backlight on the keyboard even auto-adjusts based on the ambient light sensor.

To be honest, I’m struggling to find negative points to make this a bit more balanced! The inclusion of only two USB ports (the same number as the MacBook) is still somewhat disappointing, when to my eyes it looks like there is plenty of space for at least one more. I guess you’re supposed to have wireless mice and such these days…

Also, the function keys on the keyboard don’t appear to be as easily customised as before. For example, I don’t really want F3 to be Exposé, as I can access that from the trackpad gestures, but I can’t seem to find a way to remap it to be Spaces. Well I can remap it, but it only works when holding down Fn at the same time; I can’t seem to remap its normal behaviour (without switching all of the function keys off).

Overall, though, I am really happy with this machine as an upgrade from the MacBook. It feels about as heavy, yet has 2″ more screen space and a load more power. I am definitely looking forward to putting it through its paces!

Once I’m done fully transferring all of the stuff over from the white MacBook, I’m planning to reformat it and attempt a Leopard, Tiger and Ubuntu Linux triple boot. It will be nice to have a machine running Linux natively that isn’t ageing somewhat.

NOTE: for the latest release of DfontSplitter, please link to http://peter.upfold.org.uk/projects/dfontsplitter.

The software development wheel has been turning again and I can now announce DfontSplitter 0.2 for Mac OS X.

DfontSplitter is a program which allows you to convert, or split, a Mac OS X .dfont font file into one or more TrueType font files (.ttf). TTF files are much more portable than this Mac-specific format.

This new release sports an entirely new interface built in Cocoa. It is a great improvement over the previous AppleScript interface which required a lot of unnecessary clicking and was generally quite horrible. The new interface also supports batch converting; you can drag several dfonts into the sources list and convert them all at once.

To download, please go to the DfontSplitter project page.

The DfontSplitter icon is from the Oxygen Icon set and is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Unported licence.

To solve this problem, first launch the application KWalletManager by pressing Alt-F2 and typing in kwallet. It should be the first result, so press Enter to start the application.

After KWalletManager is running, start TweetDeck again and you everything should work as normal.

Happy epoch to all fellow Unix geeks.