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 regardless of what [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Appcasting seems like a great idea to me. In short, an appcast is an RSS feed with an enclosure that is your latest release. I was turned on to appcasting when I found out about Sparkle. Sparkle made it super easy for me to add “check for update…” support to rooVid (it’ll be in beta [...]

I’m trying to load a NSPanel with a controller that inherits from NSWindowController. So my controller’s init calls: self = [super initWithWindowNibName:@"NibNameHere"]; and then I call showWindow on my now init’d controller object. All pretty straight forward. Problem is that the dang “window” assigned to files owner wasn’t showing up. Well, to make a painful [...]

I’m trying to debug a problem using Xcode’s debugger. All should be well, except the dang thing won’t break for me!? I have an NSLog statement and a breakpoint set on the line of code just before that NSLog. I see the log entry[1] but no break. ugh. I’ve sprinkled breakpoints throughout my code and [...]

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.

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 the main thread. That’s easy [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]