Archive for the 'Commentary' Category

Now running on EC2

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

Probably not very exciting to many, but I just finished moving roobasoft.com and 7 other domains from 2 virtual private servers and 1 dedicated server over to 1 EC2 instance. The move was surprisingly painless. Why did I do all this? The main reason was because the one dedicated server was real cheap and scared [...]

Getting Default Application Icon as NSImage

Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

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

Secret Core Data Reserved Keywords

Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

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 propertyList]

Monday, March 27th, 2006

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 [...]

__MyCompanyName__

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

I finally got sick of changing MyCompanyName in my new source files. To change MyCompanyName to something useful, you need to edit the ORGANIZATIONNAME in the com.apple.Xcode prefs. I used the ‘defaults write’ method described here, which looks like this: defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions \ ‘{ “ORGANIZATIONNAME” = “YourCompanyName”;}’ Surprisingly, I had to quit and [...]

Think.

Saturday, January 28th, 2006

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 [...]

Paths with AppleScript

Wednesday, January 25th, 2006

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

MPEG-4 Audio == AAC

Friday, January 20th, 2006

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 [...]

nextKeyView gotcha

Wednesday, January 18th, 2006

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

iLife ’06 Mini Review

Monday, January 16th, 2006

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 my [...]


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