As much as I basically like Xcode, let’s just say it’s not without its infuriating quirks. Among these quirks are a number of subtle bugs that seriously degrade its usability, but that only seem to appear after using it for several hours or days. Your text editors stop showing your changes, the spinning pizza of death is appearing more often, the index doesn’t quite seem to be working. Xcode has poor uptime, when compared with Mac OS X itself.

The workaround is, of course to simply restart Xcode when it gets flakey. But often this is an ordeal because you then have to go through your recent projects and manually reopen the one (or ones) that you were working on. I found myself frequently cmd-clicking the project window’s title to get a Finder reference to the project, so I could quickly reopen it after quitting.

Restart Xcode does all of this for you. Save the script to your ~/Scripts/Applications/Xcode folder, and keep it at easy reach from FastScripts or the Apple Script Menu. When you run it, it asks Xcode to quit, but not before accumulating a list of all the project documents you’ve got open. It waits for the quit to finish, then promptly reopens Xcode and all the documents.

Until Apple improves the uptime of Xcode, this script is going to save me a lot of frustration.

FlexTime 1.2 is out today, with the highly anticipated “Send Audio to iTunes” feature!

Why would you want to send audio to iTunes? It’s the fastest route to the iPod. Many FlexTime routines beg to be taken away from the computer. By sending audio to iTunes, users can easily collect a number of routines on their iPod and play them at their convenience.

Me, personally? I’ll probably use this feature to take my yoga routine with me on trips. Back when I was in music school I would have loved this feature for practicing complex polyrhythms. Basically you’d spot me walking down the street in a sort of hypnotic daze as I conducted one rhythm with my arm and spoke a different one (“ta, ta, ta-ta”). FlexTime would have been a great practice aid for that!

While I’m busy turning this into a links blog, I should point to Paul Kafasis’s excellent writeup about exhibiting at MacWorld.

Paul takes an “is it worth it” analytical approach that should be interesting to most of us and really useful to anybody considering exhibiting.

File under: future fantasy reference.

Wil Shipley writes about advertising Delicious Library. Ostensibly, the article is about advertising in general, though it quickly turns into a long exploration of Google Ads.

Still, interesting stuff for anybody who is thinking about advertising, and some of Wil’s best writing yet.