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.

Since I've recently started using the excellent FreeAgent and I really want to get a grip on my finances and accounting, I need to import my personal bank transactions into FreeAgent alongside my business accounts. This braindead artificial limitation imposed by HSBC was stopping me from doing that. So I fixed it. And with that, I give you the HSBC Prepare CSV bookmarket.

Installation

→ HSBC Prepare CSV ←

You see the link above? (Yes, the one pointed to by the arrows!) Drag it to your browser's bookmark toolbar to create a bookmarklet.

That's it, you're done!

Usage

1. Sign in to your HSBC Personal account and navigate to a previous statement.
2. Click the "HSBC Prepare CSV" bookmarklet you created earlier.
3. A little copy-to-clipboard icon will be inserted into your statement. Click it to copy the generated CSV to your system clipboard.
4. In your text editor of choice, create a new file and paste the generated CSV into it.
5. Save the file with a meaningful name like 2011-02-07-HSBC-Personal.csv (as opposed to a generic statement.csv or transactions.csv as HSBC's system insists on naming files when it does allow you to download them</rantOff>).

Once you've downloaded your statements using the above process, you can upload them to FreeAgent.

I hope you enjoy using the bookmarklet and that it helps you with your bookkeeping/accounting.

(It is my sincerest hope that HSBC will fix this huge oversight and that this bookmarklet will not be needed for much longer. If this blog post helps to shame them into doing it, all the better.)

Freeagent

If you like the bookmarklet and haven't heard of FreeAgent yet, why not sign up with my referral code – 3aixj8xt – (or via one of the links in this article), and we'll both get 10% off.

Details

The generated CSV is in the AMEX CSV format published by FreeAgent. This is the simplest CSV format they accept and the only one that is currently published.

You can see the source code for the HSBC Prepare CSV script here to make sure that it's not doing anything nefarious with your bank data.

I am talking to the lovely folks at FreeAgent at the moment to see if we can't capture a bit more of the information from HSBC personal accounts in a slightly more involved CSV format in the future.

Credits

The HSBC Prepare CSV bookmarklet would not have been possible without the following resources and components:

• Roan Lavery for FreeAgent and for pointing me to the CSV file format and for general friendship, help, and patience with a guy who currently hates accounting but is trying to hate it less.
• jQuery, the awesome JavaScript library that makes DOM traversal (as well as other things) a CSS-selector-esque piece of cake.
• Clippy, the little Flash-based copy-to-clipboard component.
• jQuery FlashEmbed, which I'm using to embed Clippy into the statement.
• The Squidoo article by echo85 for showing me how to lazy load jQuery and, similarly, the Coding in Paradise article on Creating Huge Bookmarklets.

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.

To cut a long story short, I merely renamed /Developer to /Developer-temp and the Xcode folder to /Developer, ran the installer, and then named the two folders back again (you'll need to use sudo mv /Developer /Developer-temp and enter your system password).

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).

New demo

One of my goals in releasing XAuthTwitterEngine was to have a simple demo that developer's could use as a reference – something that "just works". I still think that's necessary for MGTwitterEngine so I created a new one based on the demo project in XAuthTwitterEngine.

Check out the MGTwitterEngine demo project on Github.

Some notes on the demo:

• It's an iPhone project.
• I've removed the (frankly pain-in-the-ass) YAJL sources from the compile sources for the main target
• I've added TouchJSON and enabled it.
• It stores the oAuth token returned from the initial xAuth call securely in the keychain using the SFHFKeychainUtils helper class by Justin Williams.
• I kept most of the XAuthTwitterEngine code in comments to show you the differences between the two libraries in hopes that it will aid you in migrating your apps.
• I've done minimal testing on it and haven't had a chance to clean up the code. There are blatant memory leaks, etc. which I will look into after finishing off this blog post.I've cleaned up the project and removed the commented-out XAuthTwitterEngine code – it was more confusing than anything else.

As the first step in porting Feathers back to MGTwitterEngine, I'm planning on evolving XAuthTwitterEngine into a façade that simply proxies calls to MGTwitterEngine. When that's ready, I'll release it as a drop-in replacement to get those of you using XAuthTwitterEngine to seamlessly and transparently switch to using the latest and greatest MGTwitterEngine (or, if you don't want to wait, Scratch that, I just had a look at it and it's definitely more trouble than it's worth – it's easier to just use the demo I liked to above as a guide to port your apps yourselves. The façade should just be an intermediary step anyway.)

Hope you find the demo project useful in getting up and running with MGTwitterEngine.

Links

• MGTwitterEngine
• MGTwitterEngine demo project
• XAuthTwitterEngine (deprecated)

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.

Air Display is an iPad app that lets you use your iPad as a second monitor. It actually works really well (I also bought iDisplay, earlier, and did not enjoy the experience at all). To test your app, simply drag the iPhone Simulator to your iPad (make sure mirroring is turned off so that your screen stretches to the iPad). The coolest thing is that because your iPad has a touch screen, you can test your app in the iPhone Simulator with touches instead of mouse clicks.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't test as often as you can on an actual device (as the iPad doesn't recreate the ergonomics of the iPhone perfectly). Also, if you need other sensor data (like the accelerometer, etc.) then also consider getting an app like iSimulate to compliment your toolbox.

Hope you find this useful!

If you have time-saving development tricks of your own, please feel free to share them in the comments.

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.

This tip comes to you courtesy of Tanja (the last comment in this blog post).

So, here's some quick information from my latest foray into creating a favicon:

• It looks like neither Firefox nor Safari likes Windows format ico files with both 16x16 and 32x32 images in them (as created by default by html-kit.com's FavIcon from Pics tool, which is the best PNG to ICO convertor I could find in my brief search).
• Safari seems to like 16x16 Windows favicon.ico files but I couldn't get Firefox to read one in to save my life.
• I ended up using a PNG instead of ICO after the ICO headaches with Firefox/Safari.
• Don't forget to add <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/favicon.png"> to your HTML files (I seem to remember favicon.ico files being automatically read if you placed them in the root of your site but neither Safari nor Firefox read the one I had)

There you go. Not having delved into the depths of favicon.ico voodoo (and not wanting to, really), I hope this at least helps me out next time I need to create a favicon file.

@drewm just tweeted about a very cool free utility for developers called Developer Color Picker (DCP) by Wade Cosgrove, courtesy of Panic (developers of, among others, the excellent Transmit FTP client for OS X that I own and love).

DCP supports copying a color in a number of formats, including NSColor, UIColor, CGColorRef, CSS, and HTML style colors.

For iPhone dev, the UIColor feature is a real convenience.

To use DCP with Photoshop, simply copy the DeveloperColorPicker.colorPicker app that you download to ~/Library/ColorPickers as per the installation instructions. Then, in Photoshop, set the Color Picker to Apple in Preferences → General.

When you click on a color swatch, the Apple color picker should pop up. DCP is the last tab on the right.

The Copy with Declaration option creates code similar to the following and copies it to your clipboard:

UIColor *aColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:0.367 green:0.504 blue:0.681 alpha:1.000];

Very handy, thanks Wade! :)

It's easy to get confused as there are several outdated downloads and project pages floating around the web. It appears, however, that this github repository is where Mogenerator is being actively developed.

If you're in a rush, here's the Mogenerator 1.13.1 DMG installer (104KB) I built (only tested on my MBP running OS X 10.5.7).

If you'd rather build your own, here are some simple instructions for building and installing the latest version from trunk:

1. Clone the github repository: git clone git://github.com/rentzsch/mogenerator.git
2. Switch to the installer folder: cd mogenerator/installer
3. Build the installer: ./make_installer.command
4. Run the installer: open build/mogenerator-1.13.1.pkg

6,8d5
< @implementation SectionID
< @end
<
11,19d7
< + (id)insertInManagedObjectContext:(NSManagedObjectContext*)moc_ {
< 	return [NSEntityDescription insertNewObjectForEntityForName:@"Section" inManagedObjectContext:moc_];
< }
<
< - (SectionID*)objectID {
< 	return (SectionID*)[super objectID];
< }
<
<
195,196d182
<
 

...
< #if defined(MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_5) && MAC_OS_X_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED >= MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_5
< @property (retain) NSString *rawSource;
< #endif
...