I have an HSBC Advance account. It's a premium personal current account (ok, you can stop looking at me like I'm a fool – I get travel insurance and stuff. OK, OK, and I'm gullible!) You would think that one feature of a current account in this day and age, whether premium or not, would be the ability download previous statements in a data format or some sort.

In fact, for some inexplicable reason which must make perfect sense to you if you're a fat cat making billions after being bailed out by taxpayer's – i.e., our – money, HSBC allows you to do download statements in a variety of formats but only for recent transactions. As of this writing, my recent transactions only go as far back as the start of January, 2011. I also have access to "previous statements" that date back to the start of last year but – and it's a big but – I can't download them. I can print them but that's about it. WTF indeed.

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If you, like me, don't like to install Xcode into the /Developer folder (maybe because you have several versions of it on your computer at one time), you will run into a problem while trying to install Application Tools 1.1 to build apps for the Mac App Store.

Like a number of installers I've encountered, the Application Tools 1.1 installer fails if it cannot find Xcode in the /Developer folder. In my case, I already had a /Developer folder with a few system items in it but Xcode was in a separate folder off the root of my drive called /Xcode3.2.5iOS4.2.

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In March of this year, I created a Twitter library called XAuthTwitterEngine based on Matt Gemmell's awesome MGTwitterEngine library and the excellent work (and with the assistance) of a number of great developers (including Ben Gottlieb, Jon Crosby, Chris Kimpton, and Isaiah Carew, Steve Reynolds, and Norio Nomura). Back then, MGTwitterEngine didn't have oAuth/xAuth support and I built XAuthTwitterEngine as a stop-gap, with the intension of back-porting to MGTwitterEngine at some point.

Well, MGTwitterEngine has had excellent oAuth/xAuth for some time now and I finally got round to checking it out today only to realize just how much progress they've made. It's definitely time to deprecate XAuthTwitterEngine and start using MGTwitterEngine again (so I am back-porting Feathers to MGTwitterEngine at the moment).

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The iPhone Simulator is a handy development tool for debugging your iPhone and iPad apps as you develop them. It is not, however, in any way an alternative to testing on an actual device. One of the reasons that the iPhone Simulator doesn't give you the actual device experience is because your Mac's screen is not a touch screen. Until now, if you wanted that, you would have to either test on your actual device or use an app like iSimulate to send touches (and other device data) to your app. While iSimulate and its ilk are still a good alternative, I've found a setup that serves me well for 90% of my debug-time testing: an iPad, coupled with the Air Display app.

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Visor for OSX (Visor.bundle) is a lovely Quake-like interface for Terminal that I absolutely couldn't live without. Unfortunately, upgrading to Snow Leopard disables it.

Re-enabling it, thankfully, is very easy: Go to Applications → Utilities, ⌘-click Terminal.app and select Get Info (or press ⌘-i) and check the Open in 32-bit mode checkbox. Finally, start Terminal.app and you should have your beloved Visor back.

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