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Many a mac-fan is well aware that Apple is taking some unusual steps with it’s next Operating System revision. Not only has Apple made Snow Leopard public knowledge well before its’ release, but it will also be void of any new user-interface features.

According to Apple this release will be all about performance and size-reduction. I don’t know about you, but that sure sounds like a smart plan to me and certainly goes against the usual Software Development Life Cycle.

Unfortunately, for all us gen-y-ers, this release is over a year away and this just doesn’t jive man. However, this morning in my feedreader was mention of Trimmit - an app for Mac that strips all the unneeded cruft from applications:

• Delete junk files
• Clear resource forks
• Strip universal binaries
• Clean out nibs
• Strip debug symbols
• Compress tiff images
• Remove foreign languages

All of my Macs are Intel-based and run things pretty quickly on Leopard, but the total size of a new installation has always been quite large. Most of this space is taken up by applications - my applications folder is around 9GB - and being able to reduce this by any amount makes a significant dent on hard-drive space.

My good friend Ben and I started playing around with Trimmit this morning and it didn’t take us long to realise we were seeing some pretty impressive numbers:

At last count, Ben says he’s saved around 8GB using Trimmit. I haven’t had a chance to go through all my apps so far, but with heavy hitters like Adobe Illustrator CS3 and iMovie, I’m sure to see some good overall numbers.

The one thing I was a little concerned about before running this utility was that “it might not work” and I would find myself with a folder full of corrupt and unusable apps. As it turns out, Trimmit makes a backup of the original app before creating a new improved version. We’ve also discovered that on top of the obvious space gains all applications trimmed so far run faster than they did before! SUWEET!

The only Caveat with running this tool seems to be that it gets rid of the resource forks (optionally) which is where some applications store user-preferences, but for the most part that fact hasn’t made things too inconvenient - yet…

OS X Leopard comes with Apache and PHP right out of the box, which is great for web-developers like me. Unfortunately, someone in the Apple camp thought it wasn’t worth including MySQL - which most web-guru’s would agree is kinda crazy.

In November 2007 Dan Benjamin published an article about compiling the latest version of MySQL on Leopard, which I used to setup a dev-environment on my Macbook.

I’ll be starting at S.U. QLD this coming Monday and I already have my work laptop in hand, which I’ve been setting up over the last few days. Of course, once again I need to install MySQL, except that this time around I had a quick peak at mysqld.com and noticed that Sun/MySQL have released a Mac OS X installer for version 5.0.45 which I used to install the database engine about two days ago.

However, it wasn’t until now that I had an opportunity to really test the setup - and it didn’t work.

Long story short it appears that MySQL is generating the socket in /tmp/mysql.sock whereas it should be in /var/mysql/mysql.sock.

The solution is pretty simple and if you’re finding the same problem, try running the following in your terminal as an administrative user:

sudo mkdir /var/mysql/
sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock
sudo apachectl restart

Despite my constant efforts to shake the Fanboi stereotype, I must admit that I was counting down the days/hours/minutes pre-July-11th - when the iPhone 3G was released here in Australia.

I had decided early on to let the initial onslaught subside before going anywhere near an Optus store and when I finally went to purchase one, the wait had weighed heavily on my patience. I disregarded my love of all things black, having been forewarned of the ever growing list of black iPhone’s on order and purchased a white one - on a Saturday - which arrived on the following Monday.

Many of the blogs and podcast’s I subscribe to had reiterated the point that all iPhones would have to be activated in-store, however my guess is that this is an AT&T policy and not necessarily an Apple policy. Optus gave me no such issue and activating at home was quite fast and painless.

As with most Apple products, the iPhone offers little to complain about and has more than exceeded my expectations. But, over the course of the past week I have noticed a few areas for improvement.

First of all, the television ads are definitely misrepresenting the true speed of the Maps application. Even when connected to a Wireless access point with high-speed broadband I am not getting anywhere near the load speeds that Apple seem to.

Anyone familiar with usability knows that the last thing you want to do is hold up the user. By that I mean, making them have to wait for the software to get itself organised. Unfortunately, it seems that someone forgot to tell this to the team behind the Contacts app. My developers’ intuition tells me that I am noticing a delay when starting this app because I have a reasonably long list of contacts, but that’s not to say that I am an edge-case or that Apple can’t fix this issue.

Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, is well known for his obsessive attention to detail and it is clear that he has gone to great lengths with the glass touch screen to ensure that smudge-marks are as minimal as possible. A number of times my work mates have pointed out the smudges when it is happily sleeping on my desk. However, despite this, the pure brightness of the screen renders the smudge marks completely invisible when it is in use.

I am also quite impressed by the touch screens’ almost mind reading intelligence. It appears that the iPhone OS is using a number of algorithms to figure out exactly what you want to click on, while also offering spelling correction when using the keyboard. The result is that all the gestures feel natural and I haven’t experienced any false-positives as yet.

Unfortunately, the virtual keyboard still doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. Typing lightly or with two thumbs seems to be somewhat error prone and I’m sure my thumbs are what you would consider small to average size.

Those few points in mind, I really am enjoying this phone - if you can call it that. The software is so powerful and speedy that coupled with the convenience of the app store, it really is closer to a laptop than a phone. In fact, my black Macbook is already showing signs of neglect - I’m sure having the new SU Macbook Pro around will only add to its’ dilapidation.

Critics can mock the Jobs’ worshipers and praise the innovation coming from many of the large phone producers, but you honestly can’t beat this phone right now. If there was a fold-out qwerty keyboard available and MacroMates released TextMate for the iPhone I would seriously consider it a complete replacement for my Macbook.