Good news Widerbug users!

The dedicated Firebug team has just added the widescreen option that Widerbug enables into the core of Firebug 1.9.0, making Widerbug obsolete. You may uninstall Widerbug and go back to using regular Firebug and be able to change the layout using the option seen below.

This is welcome news to everyone, I imagine. It’s been difficult to keep up with Firefox’s new fast-track release schedule, as well as continually adapting to the Firebug internal changes. Now you can enjoy widescreen support, with Firebug in one of several locations, without sacrificing new critical updates and feature improvements.

As a longtime Mac user, I’ve had an account on file with Apple dating back to when iTools was available. Only recently has the Apple ID become much more important as a personal identifier. Back then, Apple IDs were mostly a means for me to identify myself to Apple. Now, people find me using my Apple ID for FaceTime, iMessage, Game Center, and more.

Not so long ago, I decided that I wasn’t happy with this Apple ID and created a new one to do everything with. It was, however, long enough ago that Apple IDs weren’t yet required to be in the form of an email address. So, this new one was just a new name.

More recently, I decided that I should switch my new Apple ID to be in the form of an email address like they now encourage, and verify the matching email address with it. Only, the Apple ID management system would not let me do this, reporting that:

Email address is already verified for another Apple ID

I didn’t recall verifying this email address with any other Apple ID. Even using the “Forgot my Apple ID” tool, which searches for Apple IDs given an email address, produced no Apple IDs that had a record of that email address. Even my old Apple ID didn’t list this email address as one of its verified emails.

As it turns out — and this is after trying many different things including contacting Apple ID Support — MobileMe requires a backup email address in the event you forget your MobileMe password. The email address I wanted to verify with my new Apple ID was set as my MobileMe backup email address for my old Apple ID. This counts as a verify, even though it’s not listed as a verified email address on the Apple ID site for my MobileMe account.

Simply setting up a new email account with my provider dedicated to MobileMe — one I’ll probably never check unless I need to — and using that as my MobileMe backup email address freed up the desired email address I wanted to associate with my new Apple ID.

Hopefully this will help someone who may be running into the same issue. Figuring all this out was wildly confusing at times, and even more difficult to explain to Apple ID Support, which is probably why we never got the issue resolved until now!

Apple’s iOS Simulator is an acceptable environment for testing development code, but when users purchase your finished app from the App Store, they’ll be running it on real hardware, particularly on networks that are likely much less reliable than your home or office internet.

To ensure your app performs well under real-world conditions, you can load up the code on a device and go outside, but then you can’t debug as easily. And even if you bring your MacBook Air with you, what if your Verizon iPhone is everything you hoped, and it performs admirably on the worst of days? To get around all of this, you can approximate an unreliable network with SpeedLimit. SpeedLimit is a System Preferences pane for intentionally and selectively slowing down specific ports and domains:

Download and install SpeedLimit, add one or more hosts (separated by commas, as seen above), select a target speed, and click Slow Down. Subsequent network requests matching the criteria you set will be throttled, giving you time to go all out testing your app’s performance and error handling. Does it crash when users hit the Back button while a UITableView is loading? Does it lock the UI while downloading avatars or thumbnails? SpeedLimit lets you find out, and be confident in your networking code.

My WordPress plugin for displaying Last.fm music, fmTuner, has been updated to 1.1, adding a much-requested album artwork placeholder field, and testing for the latest and greatest version of WordPress.

The upgrade will work seamlessly with your current fmTuner design, but if you visit the fmTuner Settings page, you’ll see that you can now specify a link to a placeholder image, which will be used if Last.fm comes up short on album art. Leaving this field blank (the default) will simply skip tracks without artwork. If you want to get really fancy, there’s even a fmTuner tag that will print out the path to your current WordPress theme, if you’d like different album art placeholders for different themes.

Download fmTuner from WordPress.org for the latest version!

I’ve just updated Widerbug to 1.5.0, once again up to date with the enhancements from Firebug 1.5.0. If you’re running Widerbug 1.3.3 or later, you should receive 1.5.0 via an automatic update. Or, head over to the Widerbug download page to install it.

I know at some point I should attempt to merge my changes into the Firebug codebase and submit a patch (and stop this Firebug cat-and-mouse game), but my XUL knowledge is still fairly limited. If anyone would like to take on the challenge, though, I imagine your patch would be a welcome addition to Firebug’s core!