Author Archives: Stephen McGarry

About Stephen McGarry

Prior to joining Nfonix, I worked for over five years at Trafficmaster plc developing a number of different systems to supply real-time traffic data to various customers. I have extensive experience in C# and .NET technologies and pioneered the use of automated test systems and test driven development at the company. Since joining Nfonix, I have worked on the Goal! football app, BEVA conference app, and the Memneon memory game, as well as a number of other consultancy projects for Trafficmaster and other customers. I also hold a B.Sc. (Hons) in Physics and a Ph.D. in Elementary Particle Physics from the University of Lancaster.

Taming the Lion – Mac OS 10.7 first impressions

21 Jul 2011

Taming the Lion – Mac OS 10.7 first impressions

Right, so the latest incarnation of Mac OS X has finally been unleashed. I installed my update yesterday so I thought I’d share my first impressions after a day’s use.

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Apple reports record profits

19 Jul 2011

Apple reports record profits in third quarter – ready to uncage Lion

Apple have just reported a massive increase in profits in their third quarter results – with net profits in excess of $7bn. Sales of iPads are up with a staggering 9.25 million sold in the last three months alone. Given their impressive sales figures recently, to increase profits by 125% is quite an achievement. Reports are also rife that Lion, the latest release of Mac OS X, is about ready to ship and could be released in a matter of days, perhaps even hours.

Fixed: Strange XCode warnings when adding new Obj-C class

05 Jul 2011

Why coffee and iPhone development don’t mix

I’ve been having strange warning messages appear in my project every time I add a new class for quite a while now – I had hoped upgrading to XCode 4 would resolve the problem, but unfortunately it did not.

The error message that occurs is this:

[WARN]warning: no rule to process file '$(PROJECT_DIR)/Project.xcodeproj/ProjectHeader.h' of type sourcecode.objj.h for architecture i386

As it turns out, it actually was nothing to do with XCode itself, rather my choice of coffee…
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Keyboard shortcuts for dialog boxes in Mac OS X

08 Jun 2011

Keyboard shortcuts for dialog boxes in Mac OS X

Since I switched to Mac OS X from Windows over a year ago there have been a few little things that have been bugging me with the UI and keyboard. For example, in Xcode keyword completion was done with the escape key, and I had been used to using CTRL+SPACE with Visual Studio. Apple have now resolved this in Xcode 4, and you can use either keyboard shortcut.

Similarly, in Windows, if you had a dialog box appear you could easily use the keyboard to select your preferred option. With Mac OS X I found I had to use the mouse. I hadn’t realised you can use the keyboard, and you just need to enable the feature.
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