Think first. Think some more. Think about the whole problem. Think about a little part of the problem you’re going to start with. Think about the whole thing again, in relation to your idea on the starting point.

           -Wil Shipley

My app had some code that would allow the user to spawn an unlimited number of helper [...]

AppleScript expects files in the form of

Users:bcooke:Movies:blah.mov

If you’re like most sane people, you want to use

/Users/bcooke/Movies/blah.mov

To do this, you just have to prefix your path with ‘posix file’.

via Sundown via google

In QuickTime’s export dialog, “MPEG-4 Audio” is “AAC”. Somehow iMovie and QuickTime are using a different dialog for their export “sound” options. Compare the two lists of compressors below:

Default Sound options when using ‘MovieExportDoUserDialog’

QuickTime 7 and iMovie’s dialog

The QT7/iMovie dialog has some clear advantages.

Shorter MPEG-4 Audio is re-worded as AAC (as far as I [...]

If your window doesn’t have an “InitialFirstResponder” set, each elements “nextKeyView” is ignored. I guess that makes sense? Something to remember anyway.

My copy of iLife ‘06 showed up today. I don’t feel like I’m the right person to give it a full review, but here’s my two cents:

iPhoto: is much faster (seriously, *much* faster with my 5613 photos), has cool date overlay when scrolling, a nice full screen implementation, photocasting (would love this if [...]

After spending the past couple nights with them, I can say with ease: Cocoa’s Distributed Objects are very nice. I’ve used other IPC mechanisms before (FIFOs or named pipes, sockets, etc.). Distributed objects remove at least %90 of the work compared to traditional IPC mechanisms. Cocoa continues to please.

To protect against inevitable drive failure, I clone my PowerBook’s startup disk to two firewire drives, one at work and one at home. Up until recently, that involved OS X’s Disk Utility and “restore”ing the startup disk to the firewire drive. That process was klunky and took about two hours (my external disks are slow). [...]

When I sat down tonight to work on my app, it just kept crashing. Seems a new exception, QTMovieInitializedOnWrongThread, was added to QuickTime. Searching on ADC produced 0 results. Google couldn’t even find anything about it. Fortunately, the error needs little explaining: I need to initialize my QTMovie object in [...]

While I’m transcoding video, I want to display the elapsed time in form:

3 minutes 34 seconds and 1 hour 32 minutes and 5 days 4 hours 23 minutes

I feared this problem. However, fifteen minutes of fumbling through Apple’s docs and I’ve got the answer in:

[NSCalendarDate years.... sinceDate];

I love dreading a problem and then [...]

Short version: Xcode is secretly building my release builds as universal binaries. Editing the pbxproj to remove the reference to i386 fixed things for me. update:It’s something with my environment causing this.

Longer version: I recently added Growl support to my app. It was super easy. I snagged the Growl source, built the Growl.framework and followed [...]