I was waiting for a MySQL migration to finish when I said to a friend: “mysql should have growl support to tell me when a lengthy operation is done”. 10 seconds later that became: “Even better, there should be a command like ‘time’ that would growl when whatever command you give it is done”. 3 […]

I’m going to be showing some slides (and talking over the slides) and doing a demo of RubyCocoa tonight for the Boise ruby brigade. I’ll post the code and slides tomorrow for anyone that might care. Hopefully someone learns something (minimally, I think I’ll get a lot out of it)

Update: The traineo guys provided an API and I updated the widget. See: TraineoWeight.wdgt Updated Like most Americans I’d prefer to be less fat. To help me with that goal I’ve been logging my weight on traineo.com. They offer plenty more than just weight tracking, but I haven’t gotten into all that quite yet. Anyway, it […]

I’m working on an application that will be going into a private beta pretty soon, followed by a public beta. One of the things I wanted to do was make sure the application stopped working after 30 days from when it was built. This is to make sure the beta testers are running the latest […]

Key-Value Coding is part of the magic behind Cocoa’s bindings. Up until yesterday I had only been binding to an ObjectController or to an ArrayController backed by Core Data. This is very powerful, but bindings pre-date Core Data so clearly not a necessity. So yesterday I went to bind an NSProgressIndicator’s ‘isIndeteriminate’ to a BOOL. […]

To get the icon that represents an application with no custom icon (default application icon) just call: [NSImage imageNamed:@“NSDefaultApplicationIcon”];

When using Core Data, Boolean values as an attribute are represented using NSNumber. That’s all fine and good, but it requires you to use [NSNumber numberWithBool:YES|NO] when you set the value. NO is defined as: #define NO (BOOL)0 we have an issue. 0 is also […]

Somewhere there exists a list of words you shouldn’t assign as attributes within Core Data. I don’t know where that list is, and today I got bit by not knowing. I tried to use the word “deleted” as an attribute. No matter how hard I tried to set the “deleted” value and […]

NSString has a great little method prototyped as - (id)propertyList What does it do? To quote the docs: Parses the receiver as a text representation of a property list, returning an NSString, NSData, NSArray, or NSDictionary object, according to the topmost element. If you started staring at CFPropertyList(…) functions, just trying to figure out how to read a […]

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 […]