After using my lovely Gen1 Macbook for nearly three and a half years with it's default Tiger install, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to the latest incarnation of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. I never upgraded to Leopard because, well, Tiger did everything I want and better the devil you know. Or something. I dunno, Leopard just never really "clicked" with me. However, as soon as I heard about what Apple were doing with Snow Leopard I signed up for notification of release.

A lot of Apple haters have been rubbing their tiny hands with glee recently after news reports of a security flaw in the iPhone OS 3.0 that could allow hackers to "Hijack every iPhone in the world". Many were quick to point out how slow Apple were for not releasing a patch, and many simply made it a soap box for "iPhone sucks, use Android" rants.

However, on July 31st, Apple released iPhone OS 3.0.1, with a patch for this SMS issue. It installs easily enough, job done. Of course, not being privy to such information as how to hack my own phone with this exploit, I can't check if it does the job. Either way, there it is. A fix. More detail on the OS 3.0.1 release notes.

One continuous gripe I have with OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X is the apparent failure to properly handle bullet points. It only affects MS Word .doc format, and looks something like this:

This is apparently caused by the .doc format itself. Saving a .doc file in Word or OpenOffice.org and opening it in OOo will result in this bug. It is caused by a complete encoding failure on the part of the Word document format for bullet point symbols, as it explicitly looks for a particular glyph in the Symbol font rather than looking for the Unicode code point for the character. So, on machines that don't have the Windows version of Symbol.ttf installed ... it simply displays a nonsense character. OS X has its own Symbol font with different glyphs.

Fortunately the workaround for this is very simple. You can use font substitution to make OOo look at a "Symbol compatible" font for the glyph - in this case, OpenSymbol. Open the preferences panel and navigate to the Fonts page. Then, enter a font substitution for Symbol to OpenSymbol, to be applied Always.

This will take effect immediately, so any documents you have open will magically get their bullet points back. Smashing! Here is the same document immediately after closing the preferences window:

Good news! If you are fortunate enough to own an iPhone 2G, and have unlocked it to any network using my previous instructions ...

the OS 3.0 upgrade will present no problems at all!

Just let iTunes do its thing and upgrade the phone. The baseband on the 2G remains untouched, as does the bootloader. It's all good.

So I finally joined the 21st century, boosted my Apple nerd cred, and got a funky phone to boot. An iPhone is now in my posession! So far so good, except for one small problem - I have 12 months left on my Orange contract and I don't really want to pay all that off now just to get an O2 contract. I need a way to get the iPhone to work with my Orange SIM.

Enter ... QuickPWN and PWNTools! These two excellent apps allow you to unlock and jailbreak your iPhone in style and comfort. It's not as straightforward as just following the instructions, though, so allow me to elaborate a bit.

Some many moons ago now, I had a little rant about a new scourge on the internets ... the beast that is Twitter. In it, I said that I can understand the draw of social messaging (I use IRC and IM, so the concept is not alien to me) but that I can't understand the point of sending out details of the minutiae of your life to complete strangers. However, a long time has passed since I wrote that post, so I thought it time to revisit. Why? Well, simply because I've been actively using Twitter for a while now. Yes, I have been sucked in. Bugger.

Some while ago, I wrote about NeoOffice, an OpenOffice.org port for the Mac. It provided what OpenOffice.org could not - a native interface. OpenOffice.org 2.x still used the X11 interface so integration was clunky at best.

Unfortunately for NeoOffice, that's just about to change. I've been playing with a release candidate of OpenOffice.org 3.0 for the Mac, and it's great. Fully native interface, and everything seems to work. No niggly little keybinding bugs. No scrolling issues. No strangely drawn dialog boxes. It "Just Works".

I'm not really sure where that leaves NeoOffice now, though. While I've appreciated their work, I can't really see any reason to still use it now that the "real" OOo works natively. And seeing as porting OOo 2.x to a native Aqua interface was the prime motivation of NeoOffice, I can't really see what they can bring to the table.

At the moment, the NeoOffice site claims that presentations run faster than OOo 3.0. I'm sure there are other Mac integration efforts they can use to make sure they stay a little way ahead of the OpenOffice.org curve, but for the basic functionality they seem to have been left somewhat high and dry by this latest OOo release.

Time will tell. In the meantime, you have to donate cash to get access to NeoOffice 3, while you can get the OOo release candidate for free. They don't expect to have a free release 'til January 2009. I think I'll just stick with OOo. Sorry, NeoOffice guys.

My Macbook PSU finally gave up after 19 months of undeniably hard wear. The cable frayed enough near the little magsafe connector to render it completely useless. Ah well, c'est la vie. I've just been to the Apple store and picked up another one. £54.12 if you please.

This got me thinking. One of the criticisms levelled at Apple is that you can "only" use Apple parts in Macs, and these parts are expensive. This is absolutely true, aside from the falsehoods (e.g. 3rd party RAM and hard disks). But the fact is, you actually can buy Apple parts for it. I just popped into my local shopping centre and walked out with a new laptop PSU as part of my normal shopping. I can't think of any other laptop brand that has the same level of availability of parts or accessories.

Of course, if your Toshiba laptop PSU explodes for some reason (manufacturing faults occur in all brands, Apple included. No fanboys here, ta) you could buy some 3rd party "universal" adapter from your local electronics retailer. These will probably work as well as 3rd party mobile phone chargers; adequately for a while but with half the working lifespan of an original. Or, of course, you could call the Toshiba spares line and buy an original, but that won't be cheap and you'll have to wait for it.

I don't have any particular deep or philosophical point to make here. It's just that somebody actually said, when my laptop PSU died, that I'd "be stuck buying an expensive Apple replacement." And yes, I did. But it has a full year's warranty and it took 30 minutes to drive over and pick one up. I like that.

Thanks to a friend who is far more enthusiastic than me, I've had the pleasure of following MacHeist this year. It's a two stage event to promote the indepedent software development scene on the Mac.

I haven't previously bothered with it because it conflicts with my Free software ideals. However, I'm a filthy hypocrite and I have been known to pay for the odd bit of software in the past.

The first bit of MacHeist is a sort of game. You do 'missions' and get rewarded with free licenses to Mac shareware apps. Cool. There's some good stuff available, too. WireTap Pro, for a start. Very good app, and even better for nothing!

The second bit is a sort of 'charity bake sale'. There are 11 apps available in a bundle for $49.99, or $39.99 for register MacHeist members (hooray!). So that's £20 for 11 pieces of software. Not all useful, I'll admit, but enough good to offset the not-so-great.

Unfortunately only the first eight items are available at the start of the sale. These were, in no particular order:

• 1password - Web browser keychain manager
• CoverSutra - iTunes remote control with sexy graphics
• Cha-Ching - basic finance management for the everyman
• iStopMotions - stop motion animation program for use with iSight
• Awaken - an alarm clock. Not much good for us portable owners
• SpeedDownload - an all-in-one upload/download/connection manager thingy
• AppZapper - essentially a clever uninstaller
• TaskPaper - a todo list / outline management tool

An interesting mix. 1password, Cha-Ching, Speed Download and AppZapper made the £20 outlay worth it for me. The others are just gravy. However, there are more! As different targets are reached (e.g. a certain number of sales made, a certain charity donation amount reached) more apps are unlocked that are then made available to everybody who buys the bundle.

There are three targets that need to be reached. I'm not entirely sure what they are, but two of them have been reached already. The apps that are made available are:

1. CSSEdit - a CSS editor with the unique feature of a real time preview
2. Snapz Pro X - a screenshot and screencast maker that is quick enough to even capture composited animations
3. Pixelmator - a graphics manipulation program along the lines of Photoshop Elements

At last count we were almost all the way to getting Pixelmator thrown in. That'll be a nice addition to my not-very-expensive bundle. If you want a piece of action, click this link here. Why? Oh no reason ... well, except I get freebies for referring people!

As my previous posting indicated, I now have a new aluminium Mac keyboard on for use on my Windows development machine. I also provided a link to the keyboard drivers and Boot Camp control panel. However, there was a problem!

For some ridiculous reason, the £ symbol is used on the 3 key, and you have to press ctrl-shift-3 to get a # symbol. For a programmer, this is not a good situation. The # is needed far more than £ ever is. What to do? Well, I figured I could do the same as I do on my MacBook; use the US keyboard map. The benefit is that it's exactly the same as the UK keyboard map, with the # and £ switched around. Marvellous. Could I find one? Could I hell.

Here's where the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Tool came in handy. I've created a keyboard layout based on the United Kingdom (Apple) layout installed by Boot Camp with one very small change.

• The # (hash) is now accessed by shift-3
• The £ (pound sign) is now accessed by ctrl-alt-3

Brilliant. You can download the United States (Apple) for English (United Kingdom) layout by just clicking the link. Have fun!