Since I’ve had my MacBook I’ve always noticed incredibly poor performance on WiFi when I’m on battery.

It’s so poor that Adium can’t even maintain a connection to any IM service, it starts to lag and messages don’t get delivered. Web pages only half load, videos stop 20% through, etc. The connection just does not sustain when it’s on battery.

I finally took the time to search google and see what I could find. It appears the issue plagues most MacBook’s that were manufactured before week 36 of the MacBook production cycle.

I found miscellaneous workarounds that included hiding your SSID, turning off your routers encryption and using an ACL instead. This isn’t really an option for me, I have people who use my wifi when they come over and setting them up with an ACL would be a huge pain in the ass. Another option was switching the router channel to something other then 6, unfortunately, my router doesn’t let me.

I then came across this fix, basically, it constantly pings a domain (google in my case) so airport never has the option to idle. Of course, this is going to drain your battery much faster, but for me, I’d rather have lower battery life and actually use the internet, then have fantastic battery life with no internet.

You’re supposed to enter the command into Terminal:
nohup ping -i 1 google.com > /dev/null &

This isn’t exactly ideal for me, I don’t want to type that everytime. So I came up with something else:

In terminal:
touch ~/.bash_profile
open -e ~/.bash_profile
Note: The first line is only necessary if you’ve never modified your bash_profile before.

This will open the contents of .bash_profile in TextEdit, append the following two lines to it:
alias airport_on='nohup ping -i 1 google.com > /dev/null &'
alias airport_off='killall ping'

Save, and then close. Back in terminal run:
source ~/.bash_profile

Now you can simply run “airport_on” to turn the idle-prevention on, and then “airport_off” to turn it off.

Hope this helps, if not, at least I have it written down for the next time I reinstall.

We’re still very much involved with iPhone development.

We have some other iPhone stuff going on, and we’ve begun to take on development work for iPhone apps, we’ll talk more about that at a later date though

As for MobileChat, we’re not going to disappear like last time for 6 months with no updates. We’re currently debating on how to proceed with the application.

For a full, detailed technical rundown of what exactly has been going on with MobileChat, continue after the break..

Just to answer the two questions everyone is going to have:

YES: We saw the AIM app.
YES: We’re still going to develop MobileChat.

Just as Trillian and Adium have co-existed with AIM/AOL for years, so will MobileChat. The SDK is going to let us do a lot of fun stuff, and I personally can’t wait to download it and start using it.

P.S. Looks like AOL liked our swipe/tabbing feature huh?

Themes in MobileChat v2.21

Continue reading for information about this release and a full change log.

So, when I sat down last night to rewrite the way the “Add Account” feature in MobileChat was done, I realized how absolutely terrible we were handling the Preference table. There was no “straight forward” way to UIPreferencesTable’s and further more, no simple way to implemented segmented controls into it.

So, I wrote a few classes and a helper to take care of it for me. Here’s a run down:

* UIPreferencesTableGroup — Quickly create a group of cells
* UIPreferencesSegmentedTableGroup — Extends UIPreferencesTableGroup, but adds support for Segments
* UIPreferencesController — This is the dataSource/delegate of any UIPreferenceTalbe you create.
* UIPrefHelper — You can use this even without the above classes, just contains a few quick make functions to create text fields.

Keep reading for the code and an example of the implementation…

While we wait for Conceited to update MobileChat in their repository, we’ve gone ahead and created a temporary one for everyone so they can finally use MobileChat 2.1 and get us feedback.

You can add the following repository to Installer.app and then find MobileChat located under the “twenty08″ Category:

http://twenty08.com/installer

This is definitely only a temporary solution, and we’ll be getting 2.1 on Conceited as soon as possible.

Horizontal chatting in MobileChat v2.1

Change Log:

Keep reading for more information about this release…

We’ll be release MobileChat 2.1 later this week/this weekend. It works fully on 1.1.3.

Read more after the break for a changelog, and more information about the upcoming release

The upload processing server for QuickShareIt is currently experiencing some technical difficulties.
We’re doing everything we can to get these issues resolved and we’ll keep everyone updated as we learn more and resolve the issue.

Update 3:55PM EST: We’ve fixed the issue that was causing the problem and we’re now back online.
We apologize for any inconvenience this is causing […]

We’re pleased to announce that QuickShareIt 2.0.2 is now available!

We’ve fixed a few bugs from 2.0.1 (change log below) and added some new features we think you all are going to appreciate. QuickShareIt 2.0.2 is not a mandatory update, but we highly recommend doing so!

Finish reading after the break.