If you are using Chrome and Firefox and well pretty much any other popular browser, you are used to switching tabs with CMD+number which switches to the desired tab e.g. CMD+1 will switch to the first tab (including the pinned ones for Chrome). This however does not work for Safari.

For safari to cycle between tabs use CMD+SHIFT+Left/Right

If you were playing with the "Live Tiles" from the latest (at the moment) OS update to the Windows Phone code named "Mango", you might have been wondering what makes Live tiles unique and how many live tiles can be placed on the home screen of the user. Accidentally I found out that what makes the live tile unique is the tile reference or the tile URI

a usual way to create a tile would be:

ShellTile.Create(new Uri("/GotoPage.xaml?param1=value1&param2=value2, UriKind.Relative), tileData);

so whenever you change the value1 and value 2, a new live tile can be created.

Happy coding and have fun with the live tiles!

If you are getting the:

"failed to connect to device as it is pin locked"

when trying to deploy your app to a windows phone 7 device no worries. Just make sure to disable the "screen lock" or "screensaver" whatever it is called. That's what it is all about!

I was lucky to figure this one immediately but if you got here means you got stuck with it and had to look it up. Hopefully this will help you with that problem.

If you are getting an error similar to the error below while trying to install and/or update BlackBerry SDK as a plugin for Eclipse


An error occurred while collecting items to be installed session context was:
(profile=AppceleratorProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.engine.phases.Collect, operand=, action=).
Unable to read repository at:
Unable to read repository at https://swdownloads.blackberry.com/Downloads/auth/contactFormPreload.do?code=
...


You are in luck!

Your problems are over as you found the solution. All you need to do is to clear the "Secure Storage" contents. To do that go to

Windows -> Preferences

Type secure, drill down to find the org.eclipse.equinox.p2.repository, expand this, and you will see the swdownloads.blackberry.com. Select this entry and delete it. This should resolve the issue next time you try to update/install the plugin you should be asked again for your credentials to the BlackBerry developer portal and once you put them in the installation should proceed normally.

Here's how it looks in Eclipse:

Eclipse is a great tool that I have been using for mmm... wow (!!!) probably about 7 years now and the most amazing thing about it is of course all the plugins that can really extend the functionality of the basic editor and make it highly personalized. This is great, but some things should just be in a good IDE. Like built in SVN integration. Seriously, why do I need to install a plugin for something so basic? Netbeans is another great IDE, but I use it less as most my development environments come from dedicated Eclipse plugins and while it is possible to do the development in Netbeans it is not as convenient and straightforward and this is what we the pragmatic programmers usually prefer.

So one nice thing I got used to in Netbeans is how it colors the changes that I made in the editor if the file is under version control (e.g. SVN). After I used Netbeans for a while and got to like this feature, when I got back to Eclipse I kinda missed it. It's nice and convenient. Quite non obtrusive i.e. it doesn't get in your way - you may not even be noticing this if you don't know about it.

Anyways, turns out that it is quite easy to enable similar functionality for Eclipse, alas you have to have SVN plugin I suppose for the "diff" to work. Just follow the screenshot if you want to enable coloring of SVN changes in Eclipse similar to Netbeans.

Here's how it will look (you can change colors if you want)

Very energizing and inspiring video about Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor with the Adreno GPU. Wide deployment of the SnapDragon processors (including in the new iPhone 4S) makes it so more attractive to develop for.

If you are a game developer watch the video and get inspired!

Click to view in the full post

Today I noticed that users of the Android app started experiencing problem with posting to Facebook, getting the following error:

There have already been a few threads on StackOverflow like this one for iOS and this one for Android.

It definitely like a problem Facebook created (once again – sigh)... I will try to update this entry with a resolution once there is one. Hopefully though Facebook developers will just fix this bug on their end as there are a lot of developers (including myself) who had their code working for months with no problems until today.

You can see the status of the bug and add yourself to the list here. Although the bug is open just for iOS, once fixed for iOS, it should be also fixed for Android.

If you happen to know how to fix this, please leave your response in the comments and I will update this entry so that others can fix this problem for their users in the meantime.

UPD: 6:45 EST - it seems that the problem has been resolved! Yey! Hopefully some users will realize that we (the developers) are not the ones to blame (most of the time) that Facebook integration suddenly stopped working. Hopefully the ones that realize this will stop giving bad ratings on App Store and Android Market because of that.

So I just heard about the upcoming "contracts" concept for future versions of Microsoft products (the contracts will probably get propagated at least partially into virtually all Microsoft products like Windows Phone, XBox, Tablet OS versions etc). The general idea seems to be that various applications will be able to share data and communicate otherwise not really disclosing too much about their functionality.

It is exciting news yeah, but why does it so painfully reminds me of Android "intents" system? To me it is exactly the same. Although some sources say it has some ideas similar to what former Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s proposed as the “universal clipboard” concept — dating back to 2006. I still find it hard to see how this is different from Android's intents system. It would be interesting to watch who sues who over that if at all. The huge piles of patents Google and Microsoft have do not make much sense to go to war over this.

It is interesting though to see how one of the most important features/ideas of Android OS gets propagated into other operating systems.

I am one of the lucky people who managed to snatch a ticket to Google I/O this year. The event was sold in a record time - 58 minutes. The servers crashed instantly during the registration process and it was quite nerv wrecking. In fact I could only register after 2 hours the registration started when the servers have finally came up using a link from the cache of my browser which included session ID, where my ticket was already saved for me just before the servers crashed.

Anyway, I just wanted to put the Google I/O live badge so here it is:

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I have recently started using TextMate. It's been some time I wanted to give it a try and understand why so many people rave about it but every time I needed to use it, I usually wanted to do something very simple and sometimes I just got overwhelmed by all the options and sometimes I just didn't want to invest а lot of time into figuring out how to "use" TextMate beyond the most basic stuff.

One of the options I missed and couldn't find an easy way to do was to go to the last edit. After some searching however I did find a plugin that does that. You can download the go to last edit plugin for TextMate plugin and once you install it, you will have the "go to last edit" awesomeness in your TextMate. Use the⌥⌘J combination to activate the plugin. It uses the "undo/redo" mechanism but this particular plugin solves some problems that some other apple scripts or other solutions that use undo/redo technique had.

Enjoy this plugin and enjoy TextMate, although I actually like my MacVim better for most of the stuff I wanted to use TextMate for :). And actually I find Netbeans to be very good for JS, I started using TextMate for JS, but now I almost exclusively use Netbeans. Share your thoughts, opinions and experience  with TextMate plugins and with Mac editors in general in the comments.