iOS Email tip: support for email aliases

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this, but I use email aliases pretty extensively for my various businesses – things like sales@fubarcompany.com, support@fubarcompany.com (1) and a few to track which companies sell my email address (such as amazon_customer@fubarcompany.com, which they haven’t sold so they pass the test ).  This works great on OS X – just put the addresses comma separated in the Email Address field in the account setup in Mail.app and they all show up as usable “from” addresses you can choose from when composing your emails.  But the cool part is you only have the single root email box to check & look through.

I’d not found a way to do this on iOS (no comma on the keyboard when you enter the Email Address field, just for starters) and my (painful) work-around was to set up dummy email accounts but iOS kept prompting me for passwords for them which was a serious pain in the neck!

Today I griped on twitter about this not being fixed in iOS and @rdsquared pointed out that I was being an idiot and that you simply create the string of email addresses in notepad (or whatever) as me@fubarco.com,myself@fubarco.com,i@fubarco.com, then copy this string and paste them into the Email field in the mail account setup screen in Settings.  BINGO!  Works great so I owe @rdsquared a Guinness and you should buy him one also if this is useful to you

Thanks @rdsquared!

(1) All email addresses used in this post are fictitious.  Any resemblance to real persons or email addresses, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Address Book Search Unresponsive Fix

Address Book app in OS X 10.7 Lion stopped working – type in a search string and hit return and nothing happens. VERY annoying. This is synced via iCloud and the fix was to:

• archive the address book (File -> Export -> AddressBook Archive)
• go to System Preferences -> iCloud and uncheck Addresses and choose to Delete them from this computer when prompted.
• Wait a second or two
• Recheck Addresses in iCloud syncing
• Wait 20-30 seconds for iCloud to resync them and voila, fixed!

(If you aren’t syncing from iCloud probably the export, then delete the address book file and then import archive will also work, but that’s a guess).

Xcode 4.x tip – how to get a separate working debugger window

Just figured this out today after trying once before.  If you have a multi-monitor setup like I do you may like to have the console & debugger be in a separate window.  Xcode 4 moved to a predominately single window interface which is a bummer for multi-monitor setups.  I tried opening a new window and collapsing all but the debugger / console panes but the console wouldn’t take commands and was effectively useless..

Turns out there is a trick menu item:  View -> Debug Area -> Activate Console 

So with the cursor in the console in the second window, select the above mentioned menu item and Bingo! a working debug / console view in a separate window. sweet!

 

Now to file an enhancement request for a behavior to open a separate window and configure it like this automatically

Indie Developers: Put a link to your website in help menu!

It happens too often: I open an application because I can’t remember the company name or website address and found that there is no place in the application to get to the website. This is crazy!

This usually happens for those small applications that I don’t use often, but that I think are useful (I won’t name any names here, but if you’ve been in a MacHeist bundle you might check your application for this omission).

Put a link to the website in your about box. Put a “Visit GeekAndDad.com” menu item in your Help menu or in your Application menu if you don’t have a help menu.  (ok ok, use your own domain, but you get the idea ).

This is a critical element of your marketing campaign. Yes, automatic checking for updates is a good thing and you need that.  But what if I’m wondering if you have any other products I might be interested in? What if I want to tell a friend about your product and want the URL to copy and paste into an email to them?

You should also include a way to report a bug or get support.  Now this might take the user to a forum (as a user I hate forums, especially if I have to “join” or “register”), or open a new email message  in the default mail application, or take me to a form on your website. Whatever it is, you need something easy and visible to the user.  This is how you are going to get ideas for future versions.  This is how you are going to impress your customers with your incredible support – the kind of impression that gets them to talk to their friends about your application and increases your sales.

ok. off my soapbox. have a nice day.

Useful looking utility answers question: “where did all my disk space go?”

OmniDiskSweeper is a utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and thus making space on your hard disks.

I’ve spent time doing this in the finder the slow painful way far too often.  I wonder if this is faster than the Find all files/folders whose size is greater than X Gig/Meg that I’ve used.  Spotlight (on 10.5) isn’t all that fast at these kind of searches…

Well, something I’m going to try out.

And it’s free! Thanks OmniGroup!

Startup Weekend was very fun!

Dad participated in Startup Weekend in Portland last weekend and while it was intense, it was really fun.  They are doing it in Seattle weekend after next, and in cities all over the US; back in Portland in 6 months.

http://startupweekend.org

and particularly:

http://startupweekend.org/about

The $75 admission fee is really not bad considering the number of meals they provide.