So I made an Alfred extension that will open any supplied path in a new Finder window. No fancy searching, just a direct “open this.” It uses the standard “cd ~/Documents/GitHub” syntax experienced users of the command line will be familiar with. It even escapes spaces automatically.

Installation Instructions

• Download the FinderPath extension
• Unzip the archive and double-click the resulting FinderPath.alfredextension file
• Alfred should do the rest

While I don’t know why it’s happening, exactly, I do have a fix. The wait goes away if you put the local entries on one line.

Instead of having something like this:

#virtual hosts
127.0.0.1 myproject.dev
127.0.0.1 wordpress.dev
127.0.0.1 somesuch.dev

You need to have this:

#virtual hosts
127.0.0.1 myproject.dev wordpress.dev somesuch.dev

Leave the lines that say “localhost” alone, of course. Messing with those could cause all manner of Bad Things.

Simulator at least fits on the 30″, barely. twitter.com/tapbot_paul/st…

— Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) March 9, 2012

If you’re not familiar with iOS development, the Simulator is used to run an Xcode project on a Mac instead of waiting for the freshly compiled binary to sync to the device and then launch. (Also, sometimes you may not have an iOS device handy while you’re making a minor bug fix…or you might not have an iPad yet at all!)

I can’t be the only one to think it strange that Apple would, in the long term, make it difficult for developers to work on their apps on anything other than a desktop Mac driving a 30″ monitor. (That’s a surefire way to cut down on software for the new iPad!)

This, to me at least, seems like a strong suggestion that a refresh of the MacBook Pro line is on the way, bringing with it screen resolutions equal to or higher than the iPad’s. Maybe the iMacs will get a resolution bump, too.

Edit: Ars Technica is now reporting (it’s uncanny, they posted just a few hours after me…) that the latest Mountain Lion beta has double-sized graphic resources, indicating that this is something Apple is at least working towards.

• iOS 5 overhauls notifications, messaging while cutting the USB cord [Ars]
• The Big WWDC 2011 Keynote Roundup [Macstories]
• Apple iOS 5 iPhone / iPad 2 hands-on! [Boy Genius Report]
• 10 New Features to Get Stoked About in iOS 5 [AppStorm]
• Apple iOS 5 hands-on preview [Engadget]
• Apple Has Finally Stuck A Dagger Into SMS. I Love It. [TechCrunch]
• Apple iCloud announced for free, replaces MobileMe [Boy Genius Report]
• MobileMe stays live through June 30, 2012 [TUAW]
• Apple Introduces iCloud: Contact, Cal, Docs, Photos, and Music Syncing Free of Charge [TUAW]
• Mac OS X Lion to arrive in July via Mac App Store for $29 [Ars]
• Lion Server will be an extra $50 via the Mac App Store [Ars]
• Lion requirements: 64-bit CPU, 2 GB of RAM [TUAW]
• iBookstore Finally Comes To iTunes [Macstories]
• Find My iPhone 1.2 Released, Supports Notifications for Offline Devices [Macstories]
• App Store Now Lets You Download Not-Available Apps, Like Tweetie 1 [Macstories]
• WWDC 2011 Keynote Available for Streaming [Macstories]

CUPERTINO, California—May 31, 2011—Apple® CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.

It is speculated that this press release, specifying exactly what will be covered at the keynote, is a stab at preventing the usual stock drop from disappointed speculators hoping for new hardware. (That will probably be in September.)

We already had a sneak preview of Lion last year, but this should be a look at the final product—as well as a release date. The big news will likely be iOS 5 though, with its rumored widgets and notification overhaul. iCloud is the big mystery—I’m thinking it will be some sort of storage and syncing API, integrated with iOS and Lion, for app developers to leverage.

Oh, and the iPad versions of the iWork apps are now available on the iPhone.

Enter TestFlight.

I’m not sure how it does it, but TestFlight takes the pain out of iOS beta distribution. You just build an app, upload it, enter some email addresses, and TestFlight magically takes care of the rest.

When a beta tester gets an email from TestFlight, they register their device by logging into the TestFlight website on their iOS device. It installs a provisioning profile over the air, and lets them access your uploaded application builds in the same way.

However it does its magic, TestFlight is an indispensable tool for developers.

When Twitter for Mac came out, that bookmarklet stopped working, sadly. I managed to get it to send the URL after a little tinkering, but I couldn’t get it to work with the page title for some reason.

Fortunately, an enterprising Twitter user has written a new bookmarklet that works like my old one did. You can install it by going to this page and dragging it to your bookmarks bar.

If that wasn’t cool enough, it turns out you can select some text in any native Cocoa application, right-click it and select “Tweet” to send it over to the Twitter app. It won’t work with Firefox, though, as it’s Services-impaired.

You can read about that sort of stuff elsewhere though. Apparently Apple has been testing their CDMA iPhone since 2008, and finally has a chance to roll out a new feature in iOS 4.2.5 that (I assume) AT&T wasn’t too keen on having: portable hotspot. You can flip a toggle switch in the Settings app and broadcast a WiFi hotspot for up to five devices.

You can also set the Personal Hotspot up to use Bluetooth or USB. Obviously, the latter two are for one-to-one connections. Essentially, it looks like this replaces the “tethering” option found in the current iOS build. An Apple rep I talked to believed this was the case as well.

Anyway, I won’t rehash all of the gory details here. You can read up on them from my sources.

Further Reading

• It’s Official: Verizon iPhone Coming in February
• It’s Official: The iPhone 4 Comes to Verizon
• How Personal Hotspot Works On The Verizon iPhone (Pictures)

There it is. The Mac App Store has launched with a good selection of applications, and their prices range from free to reasonably priced to, on occasion, absolutely bizarre. There are plenty of wonderful free apps, such as Evernote, TextWrangler, Caffeine, StuffIt Expander, and Twitter. There are hit games like Angry Birds and Bejeweled 3.

Here’s the strange thing: LEGO Harry Potter the Videogame (from the same folks who made the fun LEGO Star Wars games) is available in the App Store for a whopping $49.99. Meanwhile, you can get it for Windows XP for about $20 on a disc. They’re charging about twice as much for a fully digital version. I don’t quite follow that logic.

How do you get the Mac App Store in the first place? Just hit the Software Update item in your Apple menu and update to Mac OS X 10.6.6. After the reboot, you should see a new App Store icon in your dock. After dragging it to a more comfortable placement in the dock (Firefox is supposed to be the first item, Apple, don’t change it on me!) you’re ready to go.

Browsing the store is much like downloading iOS apps in iTunes, only the App Store application is so much lighter and more responsive. iTunes takes forever to switch pages, as it’s basically loading full-size web pages from Apple’s servers for every request. I don’t know what they’re doing for the Mac App Store, but it works a lot better.

Downloading an application is every bit as easy as with the iOS App Store. Using Twitter for Mac as an example…

Screenshots are displayed prominently,  with some assorted information off to the site. Reviews, of course, are placed down below the screenshots and description.

When you click on the price button and enter your Apple login details, the application’s icon appears in your dock with a progress bar, much like in iOS.

Once it downloads, you can launch it straight away. I don’t know if there is an easy way to migrate older applications to being managed by the App Store or not. It would be handy, since a lot of the free ones I use (TextWrangler and Evernote, for instance) are now available in the App Store. Paid software would be more of a challenge.

Now…about Twitter for Mac. Longtime Tweetie users may be shocked by the visual changes. The functionality is the same, but the UI closer resembles the iPhone and iPad editions than the previous Mac version. Once you get over that, you will welcome the new features: namely native retweet support, list support, tweet deletion, and streaming API support for the main timeline. (This means you will see tweets pretty much as soon as they are posted, rather than every ten minutes or so when the app polls the server.)

You can read more about Twitter for Mac over at MacStories. Federico Viticci wrote up a lengthy post about it.

The iAd Producer displays a chart giving an overview of the ad bundle, allowing you to double-click the different elements and make changes to them. You can drop in graphics and videos, choose from the common page types used in ads (such as photo and video galleries, wallpaper pickers, coverflow views, etc.) and then preview the final ad in the iPhone simulator. The application also allows you to build iAds for the iPad.

It’s a great idea, I think. It may mean more advertisers will join the iAd network, since they will have to invest less resources into their ad in order to get started. A lot of big-name brands probably don’t have serious web developers on their marketing teams.