Your Own Free L2TP/IPsec VPN
If you have a VPS for web applications, it’s relatively easy to set up your own L2TP/IPsec VPN for use by Mac OS X or iOS clients. When you’re away from your home or office on someone else’s Wi-Fi (at coffee shops or a conference), it’s a good idea to use a VPN to keep your network use secure and private. While there are free VPN services (Cloak is one), the free plan is time and bandwidth limited. You can pay to lift the time limit, but why pay for another service if you can piggyback on another you already have?
RubyMotion
Yesterday, Laurent Sansonetti announced RubyMotion, the first product from his new company, HipByte. Laurent is the creator of MacRuby and worked on it part-time while an employee at Apple.
RubyMotion is interesting, but I don’t have any plans to use it myself, especially for client work. There are two reasons.
PaintCode
I am not an artist, but a fact of life when creating apps in 2012 is that Apple’s standard Cocoa controls don’t provide everything. PaintCode is perfect for those times when I need a relatively simple icon that can be composed from shapes and I don’t have the budget to hire a designer.
Old iPad + Air Display = Awesome
Here’s one thing to do with an older iPad if you recently replaced it with the new Retina model:
Get Air Display on the iOS App Store ($10) and use that older iPad as a second display when you’re working away from your regular desk.
VC Is Destroying the Software Business
I’ve had this post bubbling around in my head for the past day or so. I almost wrote it yesterday, but decided not to. Then Tim Bray wrote about who gets the mobile money:
A river of gold for the people who build good phones. Another river for the people who run the networks. And for the developers, crumbs.
I’m going to take a leap here and blame it on venture capital.
Sold on Homebrew
I’ve been a MacPorts user for a very long time, so when I heard about Homebrew, I looked into it, but didn’t see anything compelling enough to convince me to switch. That changed today.
Why Software Projects Are Regularly Late
Michael Wolfe provides an excellent answer to the question of why software development estimates are regularly off by a factor of 2-3:
Let’s take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach.
Bundler 1.1 Prerelease is Worth It
In two posts from last year, Pat Shaughnessy discusses why Bundler 1.1 will be much faster and how to use some of the new features. Ordinarily, I avoid prerelease gems because I don’t want to risk the stability of an application. My release schedule won’t often align with a gem’s, assuming there is one.
Git: HTTPS Repository + Access Control
I’ve slowly switched to Git from Subversion over the last year or so, and lately I have begun to feel dissatisfied with my repository configuration. In this post, I’ll outline how to set up Git in a central repository model, exporting repositories over HTTP(S) and allowing for fine-grained access control.
Lights Post-Mortem
After two full seasons in the App Store, it’s a good time to look at how Lights Finder has performed and examine some of the metrics.