Changing Process Priority on Mac OS X

On Windows I used to bring up the Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and quickly change the priority of a process, e.g. to a lower priority so that some process doesn't make the machine feel slow when some CPU intensive task takes over.

On Mac OS X I thought I would fire up the Activity Monitor and right click to change the priority. Apparently it's not that easy. I fired up google and found out that I need to get the PID from Activity Monitor and then launch a terminal and use the renice command.

E.g. sudo renice +1 -p 3692

A process can have a priority between +20 (lowest priority) and -20 (highest priority). 0 is the default priority. The above will make the the process with PID 3692 with a slightly lower priority.

Migrating Shortcuts from Windows to Mac

Copy Pasting
Instead of Control use the Command Key (⌘). So Ctrl-C becomes ⌘-C on the Mac.
First of all, if you plugged in a Windows keyboard, the Start button acts as the ⌘ key.

Undo Redo
The Undo shortcut is similar, ⌘-Z however the Redo you need to hold the shift key while doing ⌘-Z.

The hash/pound # key
To type the hash / pound # key, you need to press the Alt together with the 3. I got stuck on this when I wanted to do a #import :)

Navigating Text
In Windows Ctrl-arrow keys would navigate the text word by word. On the Mac you need to use the Alt instead of the Ctrl. (Luckily on XCode, the Ctrl shortcut does the same thing). The End and Home keys will take you the very end and start position of the whole text. Very annoying since on Windows we are used to be related with the current line being edited. To go to the end or start of the line you need to press Ctrl together with an arrow key.

Quick Dark Scheme
In Windows I use WindowBlinds and my Dark Aqua scheme, (inspired from the Mac). There are some skinning applications on the Mac, but I haven't found what I'm looking for to be able to switch completely to a black skin. However there's a quick native shortcut which will invert the colors, and so if you feel that your eyes are getting strained during those late night coding hours, you can easily switch to a black scheme by hitting Ctrl-Alt-⌘-8.

Killing processes
You can either launch Activity Monitor to replace Task Manager. Or you can launch the Force quit menu by pressing Alt-⌘-Esc.

Fell in Love with the Mac

This is going to be a brain dump of the last two weeks using the MacBook.

I have been a Windows user from the beginning. I didn't like Macs a lot ("where's the right mouse button?"), until I saw the release of Mac OS X. And finally I got my own MacBook. It felt like an alien dropped by and gave me his laptop. Every shortcut I knew in Windows needs to be rewired in my brain.

Very nice machine. Besides being impressed by the hardware and OS, I was mostly impressed by getting started to develop for the mac and iphone/ipod touch.

I love the fact that I can drop into a terminal window and have unix commands at my fingertips. I have done some remote unix server admin, although I still need to learn a lot in this area.

Installing applications is dead easy...dragging into the Applications folder. You want to uninstall? You just remove it from the Applications folder! Hah. Although I have found a small application called AppDelete which will make sure to remove any config files, etc which won't be used any more.

Why oh why didn't I switch to a Mac ages ago? Money is always the problem.

I got the Macbook for development. So I got a second hand Macbook and I want to plug it to a keyboard and monitor (considering KVM switch until I put my Windows machine down). I also got a Mini-DVI to DVI connector, so now I'm using SGI 1600sw as the primary monitor and the Macbook as the secondary monitor. The SGI is quite old now but IMHO it is still a very good monitor :D. I like this dual monitor setup... on the macbook I keep the documentation and on the SGI I keep XCode windows.

Which reminds me about XCode and Objective-C. Currently I'm learning about Objective-C which apparently was released in the same year as C++, but I didn't hear about it before this year. It has some interesting concepts like categories, and I missed the fact of passing functions as parameters. I have used Java to much now. Got me lazy with that garbage collector :) Finding it annoying now to have to use reference counting to properly release variables. Got a lot to learn...

I started an OpenGL ES application for the IPhone. That just only means that I let XCode generate the template :) I'm still looking at tutorials. First stumbling block was drawing text. There are two ways how to do that. You either create a texture for the text you want to show, but that leads to a problem if you are changing the text every frame plus its memory inefficient. The second approach is creating a single texture containing all the characters and keep track of each characters kerning and spacing. Ughhh I had done the latter ages ago on Windows. Guess someday I will need to reimplement it unless I find some ready made class (which I have found yet). For now I will create a texture for each string :(.

Getting a macbook!

It's been a while. Have been busy working with a game company last year, and this year I'm working as a lecturer. Teaching students takes a lot of my time, but hopefully during the summer time I will have some time to do some small game project.

I'm hoping of developing something small on the iphone and try my luck publishing on the app store. It's not for the money, it's for the fun of it. The iphone is a pretty cool device and I've hear good things about its APIs. I've already got a quick prototype in Flash, but now I will need to port it to iphone SDK.

First things first... I need some mac machine. So I just bought a second hand macbook through ebay. Waiting for it to arrive on this island! Let the iphone adventure begin...

Lunch Prodigy interview

Lunch Prodigy has been featured in the following blog - http://www.odinjobs.com/blogs/page/thatsinteresting?entry=what_s_for_lunch_log

Editing of items, printing options and timestamp

We have now introduced the facility to also edit the items when the user is in the add items page. Previously (if the user had the privileges), he could just click on the name or price when in the menu and type the new values. But with the introduction of food categories, we needed a page where you could select the new category if you want to move a food item from one category to another.

We have also introduced some printing options by request. Some companies want to view the ordered food grouped by the item being ordered. Other companies want to view the ordered food grouped by the user who ordered them. So we introduced both options in the Company Profile settings where they can be ticked accordingly.

By request, the timestamp of when the order is printed is placed on the order print page.

We have also experienced a bit of problems with a number of concurrent users accessing the service. We are conducting some tests to resolve this issue. UPDATE: after a lot of testing it turned out to be a connectivity issue from a client's side.

Minor fixes for Lunch Prodigy

We have fixed some problems encountered by our users.

• backspace in the search field was not behaving properly in IE
• added searching capability only in the selected category
• minor glitch in the time differences between server and clients
• adding of providers can now only be done by privileged users or if users are allowed to edit content
• fixed a bug when creating a new provider

Coming soon...

• lost password feature
• timestamp when printing an order
• edit/deleting items in a menu
  

Lunch Prodigy updated

We were contacted by a big company which were interested in using LunchProdigy.com however there were some missing features which they wanted to be in there. So we gave high priority to Lunch Prodigy this weekend and here are the updates:

• Support for categories. Food can now be entered into categories and each provider can has it's own categories
• Printing also shows who ordered what
• Support for comments. Users can now enter a comment when making an order. Very useful for the picky ones who don't like mushrooms or whatever :)
• Some options to make adding/editing only for privileged users
• Option for roster to be disabled and always the same person will be taking the order.

We will be adding soon the possibility to edit an existing item provided by some provider to be placed in some category.

Site design updated

We have finally updated the design for SoftwareProdigy.com.

We are busy doing small flash games for CartoonDollEmporium.com and we're also doing a multiplayer cooperative flash game prototype. You can find more on our website.

Interesting Facts upgraded

We have updated the Interesting Facts page for Lunch Prodigy. It now displays the providers entered by the company, and how much the company spent at the providers so far. It also calculates the money spent by the user who clicked to view the page.

Lunch Prodigy minor fixes

We made some minor fixes to some annoyances when using Lunch Prodigy.

• When the order has already been taken and the user tries to delete an order item, the user is now informed that he cannot delete anything from an already taken order.
• When the user tries to delete a non-empty order, an error is displayed that all orders must first be deleted.
• When the user tries to add something to the order, and the order has already been printed, he will be warned that he should inform the person who has printed the order to make sure he gets what he wants.

Lunch Prodigy beta launched

Lunch Prodigy beta has been launched. It is primarily targeted for companies whose employees work on a computer on a regular basis and do lunch orders. Instead of having some employee running around the premises to see what his colleagues will be taking for lunch, everyone simply logs in to Lunch Prodigy and makes their order. When everyone has ordered, someone prints the order and phones up the food provider and makes the order.

After the beta phase, we will start signing up providers locally in Malta, and then we will go global.

Polished links

I have made the links served by PropertyProdigy.com more search engine friendly and also easier for users to remember and share ;)

Random properties splashed on home page

We have added a small area in the homepage for PropertyProdigy.com which contains random properties which have at least an image so we can show a thumbnail of the property.

Minor usability update for Buttonia

We have released a minor usability update for Buttonia.com. We are showing more stats to the user and also the "puzzle done" screen has been turned into a splash screen on the puzzle with a big Play Next :). Game on!!

We are currently checking manually if a game is solvable or not. We shall be trying to automating this process soon hopefully together with some community features for Buttonia.

Buttonia launched

We have launched Buttonia, this addictive puzzle game where you have to simply turn on all the buttons. This experimental game being done in our free time was done in collaboration with Sven Neumann. The game concept and coding where done by Sven, and I made the graphics and web user interface.

The game has 4 grid sizes ranging from 3x3 up to 6x6. The 3x3 is usually very easy to do, but it gets much more challenging. Currently generate a random puzzle each day for each grid size, however sometimes they may not be solvable, but we are working on that ;)

We are still in the alpha phase where we're just gathering some feedback but we'll soon add more stuff such as comments, ranking, playing more than one game per day.

Easier adding to wanted section

Users can now add wanted properties easier by just typing some free text in the Wanted section which is then reviewed before being published online.

Wanted section

We have just rolled out the Wanted section on PropertyProdigy.com.
Users can now save their search queries and get notified when a property which matches their query has been added. They can also add their query to the Wanted section.

For more information please visit our FAQs.

Refined Search fix

We have fixed a minor issue with refined searching where it wasn't taking into consideration the manual ticking of locations after a quick search with All zones selected.

Manage Your Properties fix

There was a slight problem with users who weren't seeing the Manage Your Properties link. This only occurred for users who had a property for rent only. This is now fixed.