MacOS has lost its stability

I do both iOS and Android development thus I have a MacBook Pro has my main development device. I have had one for the last 3 years. Since upgrading to Yosemite it has become the least stable development box I have worked on in a long time.

I leave the machine on and lock / put it to sleep when I am away from my desk. This may be going to a meeting, going to lunch or home for the evening. When I come back from lunch there is a very good chance, 2 out of 5 days, that the machine has rebooted. This also may happen during the day when I am actively working on the machine but that is pretty rare. The sleep cycle seems to be the main trigger.

This is an upper end machine with an SSD drive so the reboot does not take too long but it does interrupt my day and it may happen a couple of times a day, when I come in, after lunch and then maybe after a meeting. Yes, all the programs restart but they don't show up in the same position or with the same data showing. Sublime text appears on screen 1 instead of screen 2. Finder does not have the same tabs open. Chrome might be annoyed in some manner. I will not have the tabs in iTerm on the same directories.

This was never a problem in the past. The MacBook just worked. Now it reboots and has issues with DNS getting lost part way through the day as well. Ping will not find a machine but NSLookup will.

I also have a Dell PC that is used for my Windows activities running Windows 8.1. I leave Outlook, Hipchat, Sublime Text, Chrome and a few other things running on it as well. I do a lot of my graphics work on that machine because Paint.NET is free and pretty darn full featured. We also use TFS for version control and I do that work on that machine along with anything I need to do in Visual Studio including C#. I don't have a massive love for Windows but at least that machine is only rebooting when it needs to do updates, which does occur too often for an OS, but otherwise it is there ready to go.

iOS has become less stable as well. I think Apple needs to stagger the releases instead of trying to do MacOS, iOS and iOS hardware release all at the same time. I bet their QA department is hammered during that yearly cycle and it is really starting to show. I love new and exciting things but they need to be stable. Right now Yosemite is not stable and is highly annoying.

Back to mobile dev

While my stint doing AngularJS work was interesting I am back into full time mobile work. Man I missed it and I am happy to be back into it.

Of course you are always surprised about how much you forget when you spend time away from something. I get to do both iOS and Android again. I started on the Android side first as I have always been more comfortable in Java than Objective C. I have the main login, logout and initial REST calls working under Android. Today I was working from home on the MacBook so I started to tackle the iOS side of things.

First I wanted to make sure I did autolayout from the start. Apple is pushing it and there are signs that Apple will release a different sized phone and maybe side by side program running on iPads. This means your code should be able to run as resolution independent as possible. Something you do almost by default on Android.

Autolayout is a bit weird but I got the login screen to work without any code for both portrait and landscape in the iPad storyboard. I started experimenting with AppCode 3.0 but ran into issues just getting my images into the xcassets area so I switched back to Xcode for this round of fun. I will switch back to AppCode once the UI is in place and I am doing gut level coding.

I had to create the various icons and launch screen images. I had large sized assets so I used Seashore for simple scaling. It annoys me that Mac OS does not bring an app to the front when you hover over it like Windows does. I wanted to DnD the images from Finder to Xcode. Luckily I am running a dual screen setup so I just moved Finder to the other screen and did it that way.

I copied over some other code and utility files I use and got the basics of the login screen in place. Now I get to decide which JSON library to use. I might just go with NSJSONSerialization this round. I have used YAJL in the past but I did that because I needed to stream things as the data was too big to hold in memory multiple times. Right now I do have that issue. I did not need to stream on the Android side, I am using GSON over there. I do like GSON parsing right into my natural object format where NSJSONSerialization just does a generic dictionary. Makes method name traversal impossible. The objects are rather deep for the JSON I am getting back so I need to find a decent way to get to the info I need. All the REST calls are done via C# and IIS so none of it is really optimized for Java or Objective C consumption but it is JSON which I find easier to deal with than XML.

I will need to all pull to refresh and navigation menu support too. Guess I need to get my head back into Objective C and review the list of CocoaPods I used in the past.

Since all the news about Swift as been in the news as of late I have started to sniff around. To me it looks like a nice step in new direction. I like they syntax having never been a big fan of [ ] []]]]]] [[[][][]]] all over in Objective C. Swift looks JavaScript like. Don't think I care for the .. vs. ... for the loop construct where on does inclusive start / end index and the other does start / end - 1. I would rather have a more distinct syntax between the two.

Sadly I don't have current access to Xcode 6 so I am not playing with that. From what I have read neither Swift nor Xcode 6 is ready for primetime meaning it is best for me to concentrate on the old Objective C via Xcode 5 and AppCode for now. Documentation is also sparse. I hope they hammer out the issues quickly as I would like to move away from Objective C sooner than later.

I have picked up a lot of info on the Android side again too. I have done JSON work there before but again I forgot a bunch of it having not messed with it in nearly a year. Good thing Google works most days. 

Life with a Mac a few weeks in

At my new job my development machine is a Mac. Having been a heavy windows user for the last bunch of years but using a Mac on occasion to do some iOS development the change has been pretty easy.

Initial setup took some time as did learning initial command line options. Really everything else is pretty much just like on a PC. You run Eclipse, Sublime Editor, Chrome, Outlook, Finder, Terminal window, Evernote, a music player and various file viewers for images and PDF files. 

Once configured you just have to learn the proper shortcut keys to pull of frequent operations and off you go. This is a MacBook pro and I have a large second monitor. Everything is really fast.

I have been working on parsing XML and JSON files from security firms. Lots and lots of parsing of large files - will not HUGE but big as in 55+meg in size. I tried a number of JSON parsers and finally settled on Jackson as I needed to do streaming parsing and needed the ability to build simple JSON constructs on the fly as one provider uses JSON for request and response while the other two use standard HTTPS: requests with ?name=value params for requests and XML for responses.

Each API has its own set of oddities. Right now I have everything we need parsing and am using pagination to keep the response sizes to something reasonable. Next step will be hooking it all into the production code. Always good to iron out the bugs with simple test applications first.

At this point I really don't even think about being on a Mac. Sure the frame decorations are a bit different than in Windows but Eclipse looks and operates like Eclipse. Chrome is Chrome and sucked over all my settings, bookmarks and extensions. 

If I need a program I can generally find it but there are a lot less free options than on the Windows. Most things cost something or there is one or two free versions. Most programs have already made a number of decisions for you. Unzip something? Put it right where you unzipped it from. Don't ask where you want to put it. Download something? Yep, already gonna do it to the one directory I have chosen. Not a huge deal. I move things around expo facto but there is a lot more hand holding.

I have been kind of surprised at home much time I have spent in Terminal. Using Mac Ports to install software, dealing with CURL and Python etc. Some of this is for testing the API and some has been to get around Finder limitations. Of course I do the same when in Windows. Not that a normal schmuck would do this, as a developer I tend to need to do odd things.

There has been a lot of learning. I have never used CURL, xml_grep or JSON streaming parsing before. I had limited exposure to Python and Tree based JSON parsing. None of the sample code I have gotten for the APIs has been written in Java meaning I must learn CURL, Python etc. to know enough to convert to our target language. I love to learn so it has been a lot of fun for me. Gives you an appreciation for the other languages and utilities.

Working with vendors keeps you on your toes too. Good to have 3 going at same time otherwise you are waiting on one to respond while you have nothing to do which is never good. Keep me busy. Also allows you to spot differences and similarities in the APIs making some coding go faster. If this was split between 3 people that knowledge would not be shared as easily. I have shared many classes between the projects.

Other Mac things I have learned

Show hidden files in any open / save dialog  

As a programmer there are times you need to create files that start with a '.' (period / dot) such as .bash_profile. But what happens when you want to open that file to edit it? The standard Open Dialog does not show hidden or system files.

Press Cmd+Shift+.  (that is the period) when the dialog is open to show all those bonus files.

Change file association

I wanted to open JPG files in Picasa instead of Preview.

Right click on a file and selecte "Get Info"
Change default application to open it with, then click the button [Change All]

Use XML_GREP to quickly pull data from XML files

There are times you are given an XML file and you want to quickly pull small pieces of information out of it. No need to write a full SAX or DOM parser to do that when you can use XML_GREP.

Sample of a record in the XML file

<REPORT_TEMPLATE_LIST>
  <REPORT_TEMPLATE>
    <ID>1537005</ID>
    <TYPE>Auto</TYPE>
    <TEMPLATE_TYPE>Scan</TEMPLATE_TYPE>
    <TITLE><![CDATA[Executive Report]]></TITLE>
    <LAST_UPDATE>2013-03-08T15:37:07Z</LAST_UPDATE>
    <GLOBAL>1</GLOBAL>
  </REPORT_TEMPLATE>
  ...
</REPORT_TEMPLATE_LIST>

Would show:

Executive Report

...

To grab multiple tag values:

xml_grep --text_only --cond 'TITLE' --cond 'TYPE' assetDataReport.xml

Would show:

Auto

Executive Report

...

Remove the --text_only parameter if you want to see the TITLE tag information too.

How to install XML_GREP

 Visit: http://www.xmltwig.org/xmltwig/ and download latest version

  cd XML-Twig-3.42 (use version downloaded here in place of 3.42)

  perl Makefile.PL -y

  make

  make test 

  sudo make install

Format XML file (pretty print)

Let's say you have an XML file that is all one one line or has no indenting and you want to pretty print it. You can use xmllint which is already installed on you Mac to do that. Here I am converting Sample Report.xml to newfile.xml where Sample Report.xml is the original unformatted file and newfile.xml is the indented pretty version of the file.

  xmllint --format --encode utf-8 -o newfile.xml 'Sample Report.xml'  

What I installed on my Mac at new job

Boy it has been a long and winding road to get the new MacBook Pro into a useful state. I realize Macs are meant to be super easy to use but that gets in the way of power users.

I have learned a lot of new terminal commands, where files reside on a Mac, naming conventions when reading Mac web pages and what not. I will try to share what I can before I forget it all and move on to the next thing.

I wanted to see hidden files. Executing this in terminal allows for that:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

Change the TRUE to a FALSE to reverse the change.

~/ means your home directory when you are on a web site.

See the first five lines of the clipboard

pbpaste | head -n 5

Terminal is OK but I wanted a tabbed support as I use Console 2 on the PC. I installed iTerm to handle that situation. I also like a semi-transparent background on the terminal as I am generally monitoring things behind it too.

Finder is really not my cup of tea but I was able to get around most of my issues using xtraFinder. While this program is still in beta it fixes the major issues I have with Finder and it is free.

1) Tabs to open multiple directories instead of having multiple windows open on screen
2) Grouping folders first then files. Never understood why Finder does not have this option. Most of the time I am looking for a folder first then a file within second, I don't want to scroll way the heck down to find my Folder. I know I can sort by Kind to get them in group but that still puts them randomly somewhere grouped in a list.

I copied in my music files from a USB key from my Windows box. There was a stupid desktop.ini file left in each album directory. I wanted to delete all of them which on Windows is:

del desktop.ini /s

For the Mac I needed:

find . -name 'desktop.ini' -print -exec rm -fr {} \;

I realize this is a more powerful command but this is a simple thing I need to do a lot and what I had to type to make it happen was not straight forward. I will have that command in my pocket from now on though.

I had to tweak my security settings to allow me to install things not from the Mac Store. Good to stop a normal user from doing this and it was a one time change to make me happy.

Mac Ports seems to be the way to go to install 3rd party products. You need to know the name of what you are installing. You get to type your password a lot as you are using SUDO commands left and right to accomplish this. It works and the web sites are really good at listing the port name you need to use for the install.

Just found you need to do this after installing Xcode and the Xcode command line tools:

sudo xcodebuild -license

If you don't then you will get errors when attempting to install programs.

The company uses VMware Fusion so I had a license. I was able to quickly install Win 7 professional from DVD. Some of the production apps are written in C# thus the need for a VM to run them.

iTunes does not support common audio file formats so I used Adapter to convert music to MP3 so I can listen to it on my Sennheiser wireless headphones. I have had them for a couple of years now and still on first set of rechargeable batteries. While not perfect, an occasional hiccup due to interference, they have served me well.

At the prodding of the other developer who started on the same day as I did I installed Evernote. Nice app to type in random thoughts and to do lists as they hit my brain. I can see all that stuff on my Note II which makes it very easy to remember the crazy list of items I still need to bring in. 

I use Sublime 2 as my text editor. I like it that I have the same editor on my PC at home as on the Mac. Some of the keystrokes are a bit different but I am getting used to that too.

All the other set up was configuring SQL settings, other environment variables, VPN, tweaks to various programs so they operate to my liking and doing web research on my first project and on tools they use here that I am not deeply familiar with yet.

I also need to find out coding style. Seems to be opposite of the last job no matter where I go. I am used to braces on same line but it appears that they are on separate line here. No big deal to me, configure Eclipse to do it that way and get on with life. 

Do wish I had a docking station for the MacBook, unplugging everything to take it home for the night is a bit silly. Was so easy to undock the Lenovo laptop at old job and put it in bag with extra power supply. Not enough USB ports and they seem to trickle charge my phone. I have the external keyboard in one port and my phone in the other leaving zero for anything else.

What to install on a new machine?

What do you install when you get a new machine? As a developer you have to install a lot more things than a normal user.

For a Window box I need the following:

• Java SDK
• 7 Zip
• Eclipse
• Android SDK
• Sublime Text
• Chrome, FireFox, Opera to test websites (IE is preloaded)
• SmartGit, Tortoise, TFS (what ever version control you currently use)
• Console2 (allows you to do transparent / tabbed command lines)
• Greenshot to get easy screen shots, annotate and crop them
• System Internals (lots of tools, need most of them)
• Paint.NET (so far my favorite free paint program)
• Hoekey (run things off Win+key combinations)
• Pencil (quick wireframes)
• MediaMonkey (music and other files)
• Python (for quick scripts and easy file parsing)
• Picasa (for fast photo viewing)
• Various USB / ADB drivers for Android phones (Motorola, Samsung, HTC)

For a Mac I need the following:

• Java SDK
• Eclipse
• Android SDK
• Xcode
• Sublime Text
• GIMP (for painting chores)
• AppCode (if company will pay for it, I like it better than Xcode)
• Source Tree (if using GIT)
• Chrome, FireFox, Opera (Safari already there)

Both 

• Chrome extensions, FireFox extensions or both
• Current set of bookmarks (auto imported by Chrome)
• Existing code snippets I have collected over the years
• Music
• Wireless headphones (not really an install, just plug them in)

It can take a bit of time to get it all set up but it really is not that big of a list. Most things are already on the box ready to roll. If it is a totally fresh machine you have to install the latest updates from Apple or Microsoft before you move along too far. I try to carry most of my list on a USB key so I can hit the ground running instead of eating up bandwidth trying to get the required bits on my first day.

My new job will provide a MacBook Pro. I need to get used to GIMP again. I have been using Paint.NET mainly for the past year. I have had positions where I have both a PC and a Mac and I have cheated and used the PC for a lot of my graphics work just because I am familiar with it. I have Photoshop Elements at home and I use that too. I will also have to spin my head into Linux command line usage. Not that I need the command line very often on a Mac but when you need it you need it bad and don't want to have to look up every command.

In general it is not too hard to switch between a Mac and a PC. I will have the same keyboard - a Microsoft Natural 4000, at home and work. They layout just works better for me. Some of the keystrokes on the Mac will mess me up for a bit. I used to switch between the two every few minutes as I was doing Android work on one and iOS on the other or I was testing our main Java app on both so I would be testing layout differences.

Always interesting to start on a new machine then to start realizing what you are missing. Some program that you only use so often. Of course in the old days you had to dig out a CD or a floppy disk and install it. Now as long as you remember the name you can download and install it off the internet. Physical media is not used much. 

My wife got a new laptop and I was able to set it up pretty quickly. It is a Lenovo laptop I got refurbished from Microcenter as I did not want a machine with Windows 8 and I wanted something with a lot of RAM and a good processor. Save but sturdy. Why not Win8? Am I not a tech? Yes I am a nerd but she would be the only one in family with Win8 and I just did not want to mess with it. I have not heard good things at this point. Generally skipping every other release of Windows has been a safe bet.

I was able to install things quickly. I had to dig out or Quicken CD but everything else came off the web including an install of Office 2013. She was up and running easily and does not use the machine for development so my list about was cut pretty short. She does a great job keeping her documents and what not on our home server so everything was there. Calendar, Contacts and emails are done through Google as they sync with her phone so all of that was ready too. The cloud sure has made things much easier. The home server, which is backed up Mon, Wed, Fri, also helped a lot. It serves as a printer server too.

Ready to get my new Mac going. I will add to the list if I find other things I needed to install.

Sharing a keyboard and Mouse between a Mac and PC

My main development box is a beefy dual screen PC. I do a lot of Mac work too. I test all our WebStart Java based code on the Mac to make sure controls are sized correctly, accelerator keys work as intended etc. That is all done with IntelliJ. I also write all the mobile code for iOS devices via Xcode and Android devices via Eclipse meaning I switch around a lot.

I tried VNC for a few days but ran into too many short comings. I have the Mac hooked up to my second LCD and switching video inputs is easy enough but hauling over the mouse and keyboard was annoying.

Yesterday over lunch I picked up a KVM at Microcenter. Box listed it at $29.99 but it rang up at $12.99 at the register. This is the TrendNet 2-port KVM Switch Kit TK-207K. Simple piece of hardware about the size of a deck of cards, just a little thicker and wider. I plugged in my USB generic mouse and MS Natural Keyboard 4000 to the device and plugged in the included outbound VGA (not using) / USB cables to the PC and the Mac. There is a 1 and 2 button on top of the box you press to toggle between machines. If I am on the PC I can hit Scroll Lock twice to go to the Mac but it does not appear to work from Mac back to PC, instead it dims the screen. Press the button is no big deal.

Both machines seem to be happy doing the switch. I can now run everything off the one mouse and keyboard which is making life much simpler. The other big advantage - the MacBook Pro only has two USB ports. I had the mouse in one and the keyboard in the other. I only need one for the KVM switch. This allows me to plug in a USB key, the iPad or whatever without pulling the keyboard.

Here are the minor issues:

1) On the Mac the main screen in the laptop screen. Everything wants to start on that screen even if a program is on the second screen it wants to show pop-ups / associated windows on the primary screen.

2) Just put Lion on the Mac so I could upgrade to latest Xcode. By default Lion does scrolling opposite of what Snow Leopard did. This makes it act like a iOS device which is fine when using touch pad but annoying when using mouse especially when you switch between it and Windows during the day. I turned off that setting.

3) Can't double scroll lock to switch back to PC side.

4) Wish I could run both my external LCD screens of the Mac even if it meant shutting down the laptop display. If that worked I could switch to just using the Mac for email, IM, IntelliJ for Java, Eclipse for Android and Xcode for iOS. The laptop display is OK but not positioned on my desk in a good spot right now. Once you get used to two 24" displays you don't want to go back to a 15" display.

Switched text editors


I had been using PSPad on the PC for the longest time. I then switched to NotePad++ and then after reading a number of glowing reviews of Sublime Text 2 I switched to that. Seems to work out nicely on both the PC and Mac. I had been struggling to find a good text editor on the Mac and was using JEdit. Using the same editor on both machines is very handy.

I tend to leave a text editor open on my machine at all times with multiple tabs going. Right now I have 5 tabs running - Work info, Android Notes, Charge Capture Mobile, Front Office, Tablet Calendar - one for each project I am in the middle of working on. During the day if someone stops by with a suggestion I type it right into the appropriate file. Maybe I come up with some wild idea - type it in. It is my way of keeping massive to do list, future notes, things to investigate and random thoughts all where I can find them easily.

The Mac will take over my Tablet Calendar notes as that is where I will be doing that work for the time being until I start the Android conversion. I also end up opening source code from other projects to steal code snippets so having a bonus text editor open is very handy. Its other big job is grep. Any text editor must have "find in files" to be useful to me.

Using TightVNC for Mac development

My main PC machine is a nice dual screen setup with a fast process and lots of memory. All of my email and IM processing happens on that machine. When I use the MacBook Pro for iOS development I run into multiple issues:

1) Screen is smaller (nice screen but smaller)
2) MacBook Pro keyboard is missing keys I use a lot for programming such as Home / End
3) Company Global Policy times out / locks my PC after 5 minutes
4) With PC locked out I have a blank screen and don't see incoming instant messages and emails

I enabled screen sharing and set up a password for it on the Mac. I then fired up TightVNC on the PC and connected to the Mac. I now get to use my PC keyboard and mouse and have Xcode up in a window on my PC. The PC has a large screen at 24" vs. 15" and more pixels thus I can run the Mac OS in a window and not lose any of my PC context.

So far TightVNC has disconnected a couple of times but a simple click on the taskbar icon brings it right back up. The Mac seems to be happy about the whole thing. I am not seeing any issues with typing, mouse or screen lag. iPad emulator appears to work fine too. On occasion it can be a bit tough to get the Mac taskbar to appear. Since the Mac is sitting on the desk right next to me I can quick swivel my chair and pull it up there. Probably just need to find the sweet spot to let the mouse hover.

At times I think about getting a used Mac Mini to continue iOS development at home. I have not wanted to do that as I thought I would need to set up KVM switch. Did not want to buy a Mac laptop due to cost but the Mini is pretty cheap and setting it up to do VNC is simple. I would have no need for the KVM which can get pricey if you want digital monitor connections. What's a little network bandwidth between friends?

** UPDATE **

I think I am giving up on using VNC with the Mac. TightVNC was crashing a bit too often. I set up UltraVNC and I was able to get the keyboard confused too many times. UltraVNC did not crash but you can't properly use the Windows key with it either. It is just getting to be a bit too much of a headache which means my dreams of a Mac Mini sans KVM are going out the window too.

Win 7 Professional always freezes at 15% during patch installs

Various machines around the office - all Win7 64bit Professional - freeze during patch install shut down at 15% complete. We hit the reset button, tell it to boot normally when prompted and the patches install just fine. This has happened every time over the past year that we have installed patches. I don't have this issue at home where I am running Win7 64bit Ultimate and Home. Annoying but does not seem to be a show stopper.

I have completed my work on the JIDE update. There are some outstanding issues but others are fixing them while I get back hot and heavy on the MigCalendar scheduler replacement. I have some open Mac issues with Jidesoft. They don't appear to do much testing on the Mac which is a shame. You can basically use the main OS look and feel on the Mac but the other ones are useless. Colors that are not readable, tabs that are not clipped so they paint on other tabs etc.

I was doing various bits of editing of the code under IntelliJ 11 on the Mac and PC and ended up getting SVN all confused. I finally just extracted a fresh copy of the code and renamed the directory to get the Mac to play nice again. I was doing weird stuff like double editing files on my home PC and the Mac laptop then trying to revert on one and check in on the other. Classes were moved to new packages etc. which I am sure caused a great deal of grief. All fixed now, just some of the fun of being a multi-platform developer.

The MigCalendar conversion is going nicely. The new JIDE based grid is so much faster at everything you can hardly believe it is functional, it feels like something should be missing otherwise how can it be this fast? MigCalendar has a lot of wonky ways of doing things and used a lot of static collections to do it. Glad to be rid of it. I did a build yesterday with no MigCalendar references in it at all. I deleted a ton of code and old dialog boxes in the process. Plus the new scheduler is so much more flexible and configurable. The clients are going to be elated when we ship.

I plan on writing an email to the MigCalendar folks letting them know why we are discontinuing the use of their product. I figure developers rarely are notified as to why they have lost a sale so it seems only fair. We just found it to be to bulky, not flexible and the documentation to be poor to non-existent. I was never able to find any useful references on the web either an they only allow you to see their forums if you are paid up on your license. Not a way to run a successful business in our book.