While tracking down a memory leak in my latest app, which looks to be a known problem with the simulator, I ran into someone suggestion to run the “Build and Analyze” (B&A) command from the Build menu in Xcode. Being an Xcode novice, I had never tried this before. Well, I would just like to thank Apple for including this feature because it helped me to fix an intermittent crashing problem, better understand Objective-C reference counting, clean up my code, and just have a better sense of satisfaction about my code.

Coming from the Java world, B&A seems to be a lot like Coverity which can do static analysis on your code except B&A is a lot faster. I’m not sure how often I’ll run B&A, but it seems like a good idea to clean the project and run B&A after every feature and/or major code restructuring. If you’re not already using B&A regularly I highly recommend you do so.

I just got a new MacBook Pro 13″ to replace the old PowerBook G4. The migration has gone very well. All my day-to-day stuff is working fine and my Grails project came over in good shape. My one concern is all the stuff I’ve installed with MacPorts. I don’t know if any of the existing stuff was compiled with any architectural dependencies. I’m upgrading the out of date ports and that seems to be going okay, but I haven’t run many of the ports yet, so things might still goy haywire at some point.

Aside from the speed being a huge improvement, I’ve been getting used to the new multi-touch pad. I’ve had to adjust the placement of my fingers a little to keep the pad from detecting gestures I don’t intend to make. One gesture I keep making is to enlarge size when I mean to scroll. Having two-button mouse down as equivalent to a right-click is much better than the old control-click, but I find myself falling back to the old method occasionally. Also, the ability to press anywhere on the pad to make a mouse click is great, except my thumb is still trained to sit cocked at the bottom of the pad to click. In the past, the thumb position has caused my hand some discomfort, especially while playing games and the mouse click anywhere feature should solve this problem… once I train my thumb to get out of the way.