I’m in debt to a lot of people for their help with rooVid. For some, the help was directly pointed at rooVid via questions I asked or suggestions made. For countless others it was via the wonderful blessing that is the web. One of the things I get a kick out of is when I just wander into a solution to a problem I’m not actively working on, yet I know I need help with. This morning was one of those times.

I want to add a progress bar to rooVid’s dock icon. This one progress bar would be the aggregate of all the running tasks. How does one add a progress bar to their dock icon? I don’t know, but I’ve known for a couple months that I wanted to do it. My best lead was Chad Weider’s CTBadge. The plan was to look at Chad’s sources and learn how to draw a progress bar. Well, today I found a solution that should be quite easy to implement (I’ve already created a proof of concept app in almost no time). The solution is Uli Kusterer’s UKDockProgressIndicator. The funny, it’s a small world, thing here is that Uli Kusterer commented on my Sparkle post over a month ago. But that’s not how I stumbled into UKDockProgressIndicator. I stumbled into it via:

• Andy Matuschak posts about Sparkle Beta 2 and NNW picks it up
• In the comments of that post, Andy mentions Uli’s app called Shovel, and how it might be gaining support for Sparkle’d applications soon. However, Andy does not provide a link to shovel.
• Google “Shovel OS X”
• Find link to Uli’s site via Softpedia
• Poke around on Uli’s site a bit and bump into a blog entry about UKDockProgressIndicator

This wandering into solutions happens enough that it’s one the first things I do when I can’t figure out how to tackle a problem. To many, that’ll sound like procrastination, and, well, it is. But nonetheless, it’s effective. Can’t argue with the results.

update: As I was driving to work I felt I needed to update this entry with this addition. Here goes: As a religious man, I’d be stupid to think that all this “stumbling” was really just random luck. Yet, going into any detail on my religious beliefs is not the focus of this blog. So we’ll just leave it at this: Yes, some of it may just be random stumbling (if you look around enough, you’re bound to find an answer to something), however it’s important for me to acknowledge that (according to me) there is something greater going on and I need to remember that and give thanks. There, I feel a little better now.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 4:10 am and is filed under Cocoa, Code, rooVid, roobasoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.