Archive for September, 2008
The Case of the Missing HUD Controls
Sep 22nd
With the advent of Leopard Apple made some significant upgrades to the library of UI controls that it makes available to developers through Interface Builder. One of the more lauded controls was the inclusion of the HUD Window.
The celebration over the inclusion of this flavor of NSPanel was quickly followed with confusion and anger over Apple’s apparent incompetence to deliver any of the standard controls in a HUD flavor. Apparently someone got tired of waiting for Apple to realize their mistake and decided to just whip up their own versions instead.
Head on over to binarymethod.com and checkout the free BGHUDAppKit library and Interface Builder plugin.
The Mac Developer Roundtable Episode 12: Developer Groups
Sep 22nd
If you’re a fan of Scotty’s podcasts (though who isn’t, I mean really…) and you think you can stand to listen to me and 6 other guys ramble on about developer groups for 1 hour, 34 minutes and 4 seconds head on over to Mac-Developer-Network.com and download the latest episode of The Mac Developer Roundtable.
I was lucky enough to be joined by a great crew of developers: Scotty (of course), Jiva DeVoe, Joe Heck, Paul Kim, Dave Verwer and Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch.
This is my second time recording a podcast with Scotty and I think I did a lot better than my first outing. Hopefully Scotty still feels that I’m a worthwhile guest and I’ll get to polish my skills a bit more in the future.
Bar Harbor, ME: A Screen Saver
Sep 9th
A couple of years ago I whipped up a photo screen saver bundle from some photos that I took while my wife and I were on our second honeymoon. I’ve always meant to release it, but have just not gotten around to whipping up a download page for it or uploading it to MacUpdate or Apple Downloads.
That being said, I’ve decided to provide it here for now, just to get it into a few folks hands and maybe even gather some feedback on it. It’s a doozy of a download (47.3 MB) but it contains 12 high resolution photos in and around Bar Harbor.
Grab it here: BarHarborME.slideSaver.tbz and let me know what you think.
This content is being provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported license.
stevenf.com: How To Report a Bug
Sep 8th
Steven Frank (of Panic fame) has posted a great article on his site: How to report a bug in a Mac OS X application
Here’s the teaser:
Bugs happen. It’s a fact of life. Although you may not be in the mood at the exact moment they strike, the best possible thing you can do is file a bug report with the developer. You may not get an immediate solution, but you will provide extremely valuable forensic information that should help the developer fix the problem over the long term. Here’s how to report a bug effectively.
Developers hate having bugs discovered by their users, but hate getting lousy bug reports even more. I’m tempted to include a variant of this article in the Help section of my next app under the heading, What should I do if I think I’ve found a bug?
The Book: 3rd Edition
Sep 7th
Just from reading the title of this post most of you already know that I’m writing about Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 3rd Edition by Aaron Hillegass. I am currently working through this fantastic manual that claims it will teach me 80% of what I need to know in order to get started.
Now it’s true that I’ve already released an app into the wild and some of you may be asking yourselves why such an accomplished software author would bother going back to learn the basics. First off, quit kissing my butt with that “accomplished software author” stuff, I’m not even close to that goal yet. However, your question is valid, why am I starting back at the beginning? The truth is that even though I consider myself a semi-decent programmer, I am hardly a decent Cocoa programmer. Yet.
When I decided to write Bezipped I chose it because it was an app that had a small enough scope that I could create it in a short amount of time, but big enough that I could make a decent amount of fundamental mistakes in its design and execution. I needed some sort of starting point, a basis for all the stuff I was going to learn, a comparison point for all the stuff I would do wrong.
I currently have 90 pages left to read in The Book and once I finish I’m most likely going to rewrite Bezipped from the ground up using all the techniques that I’ve learned over the past months. I may even document it on the blog here so you too can learn from my mistakes.
