• a copy of the invoice with the serial numbers of both the Mac and the iPod
• the Apple Online Store reference number
• the bar codes from both products' packages together with the part of the package they are glued on

You have to enter your name, address etc. together with the reference number online to get an special discount number. Then you have to print out a page containing this number and send it together with a copy of the invoice and the bar codes to an address located in the United Kingdom.
After a few weeks you should receive a check... I am curious if this really works. ;-)
Anyway, see what I did for the money (<german>brutalstmöglich!</german>):

The previous MacBook was a pretty good machine, but still here are some aspects that got even better:

• it seems to have much more efficient fans or cooling system: it takes longer until the fans reach a rotation speed at which they are audible.
• the new LED backlit display is significant brighter and more colorful than it's predecessor.
• it uses the iSight adjust the display brightness according to the ambient light.
• it ways noticeable less.
• the multi touch gestures are really nice (I finally can use them - yay!) and I think I will use them a lot when I work without a mouse connected.

I am so happy with this excellent piece of art. :-)

I have been using Eclipse for nearly three years now — and it is a really great development environment — but there are just to many stumble stones that prevent me from working the way I usually do. For instance, every once in a wile I can not type an more or even scroll through my code as Eclipse is busy updating the workspace. Perhaps it has just found the cache folder and tries to index its content – I can only guess.
However, the real pain-in-the... was the interaction with SourceForge.net's SVN services. I do not want to start writing about it, because it would only end in explicit blogging, so just have a look at this collation of screenshots:

Eclipse problems...

TextMate is fast, handy, works as "it should" and is fully-loaded with lots of time-saving and customizable features. This is the first time I thought someone has thought well during developing an editor. Just take a look at these three four features which just make so much sense:

• Select some text and enter " and the selected texts gets surrounded be with ".
• The cursor position or currently selected text is stored for every document.
• The tree's open elements are saved automatically and restored when opening a project.
• The project-wide search uses a cache.

TextMate just rocks!

There are many pages with detailed information about what makes TextMate the superior editor, but I want to concentrate on facts and features that are important for me and increase my productivity or enhance my workflow.

Features

• Bookmark handling
• Execute shell commands
• Snippets
• Folding
• Source control handling

Shortcuts

• Search (in project) as you type
• Show file in project
• Show file in finder
• Go to symbol
• Quicksearch
• Cycle through opened documents

Did I mentioned how fast it is and how few memory it consumes? ;-)

Here are some of my settings (basically optimized for qooxdoo development):

My files

• Color set (based on IR_WHITE)
• qooxdoo snippets
• Regular expression to ignore folders

Just download the demo and try it on your own. You will not be disappointed. :-)

Details about some server

Details about a Windows server

Nice icon, right? ;-)

MacBook

Before Christmas I bought myself a present and bought a MacBook in order to use it as my private and partly commercial developing machine. My father always told me to switch to the Mac platform, as he is working with Macs since the Apple //c which was released in 1984... Anyway, since I work a lot with qooxdoo ;-) I also wanted to have a native unix-based working environment.

OS X Console font

I never really liked Apple's default mono space font Monaco. Andale Mono looks much better, but my absolute favorite is Inconsolata.

Multi touch gestures

Since I wrote about mouse gestures I was very excited to see the multi touch technology integrated in the new MacBook Air. I really like to see Apple developing better user interfaces. And hey, I want this gestures for my MacBook, too. ;-)

I want to point out Apple's supremacy in usability by looking at the way short messages are handled on the iPhone and on mobiles phone running Windows Mobile 5.0.

SMS handling on iPhone and a Windows Mobile based mobile phone

Apple was the only company which realized the important difference from short messages and e-mails: short messages very much like chats between two persons, while e-mails are like written letters.
So where is the point in having the classical separation between inbox and sent items when a SMS conversation is totally different from e-mail? Often e-mails are used chat-like, but in this case you always have the previous dialog blow or above the new text. Imagine you would only have the latest answer of the person you are writing to. If this text would contain something like "Ok, tomorrow then." you would have to go to your sent items folder and search for the last e-mail you sent to this person in order to understand what he is referring to.
Sounds uncomfortable? But this is exactly how short messages are handled on Outlook on a Windows Mobile powered mobile phone. I own a XDA mini S which is nothing else than a HTC Wizard 200 and had the idea to write a different viewing mode for short messages, but never finished this project, because it was more work with the .NET Compact Framework, than I first thought. ;-)
Why did nobody realize that short messages are not e-mails? I guess the engineers at Microsoft just wanted to add SMS support to Outlook Mobile without thinking one step further or thinking about other possibilities to handle them.

Nobody knows by now if the iPhone is going to be another successful product, like the iPod. When the iPod came out it showed the best solution for handling your complete music collection. Together with iTunes everything from ripping a CD, changing a song's name or making custom playlists just needed a few clicks — the rest was done automatically in the background. That was at a time when you had to copy files to your digital music player — which was mounted as a mobile hard drive — and most of them just read in the directory tree and played all files one by one ordered alphabetically.

Whether the iPhone is a success or not, Apple has agin shown that the quality of products can be improved by its handling and usability. This is a point we all can learn: sometimes it is necessary to think one step further or just in another ways as others to get the one bit better than your competitor.

So, think different.

My first impression is: wow, this thing is fast! It runs my applications in development and all test cases or prototypes at a similar speed as Firefox. Positioning elements is done faster in Firefox, but setting other attributes seems to faster in Safari. I have run some benchmarks to get a better impression of this.
In the past I had some problems running some test cases in Safari on OS X, which stopped on JavaScript errors which were difficult to debug in Safari. So, it is amazing that everything runs in Safari now.
I have to figure out how to enable Drosera on Safari for Windows to really use this browser for testing.

On my machine I have a strange problem with fonts, which occurs from time to time. It looks as if some characters can not be displayed.

I'm curious about Ben's report on the WWDC 2007. Be shure to read his blog in the next days. ;-)

Update:
Thank you daeg for informing us how to enable the debug menu on Windows machines in your comment on the Slashdot article Safari on Windows.