Nov 28 — 17
This page was just pointed out to me by Matt on macosx-talk. In theory, it discusses Mac OS X from the perspective of a Linux user. It may be well-intentioned, but there some major gaps and errors in the
Nov 23 — 0
So we've succeeded in tracking down two Xserves to host a few sites, including Cocoa Dev Central and Theocacao. The trick now is that we need a couple of 10-client licenses for Tiger Server ($1000 total). Would anybody care to donate or offer these to us at a discounted price? :) As most people know there are no ads on CDC, but there are ongoing operating expenses like this.
Nov 21 — 14
There's no shortage of people asking questions on macosx-dev and cocoa dev, but shockingly few people are writing the type of messages that will result in useful responses. Here are a few guidelines to work from
Nov 21 — 2
Video playback in iTunes just doesn't seem to work the way it should. First and foremost, the playback should start immediately. Unfortunately, there is usually severals seconds of spinning beachball before the video starts. I can't see any rationale for this because the QuickTime player starts
Nov 20 — 0
The default name for the app delegate in a Core Data template changed in Xcode 2.2 from "XXXAppDelegate" to "XXX_AppDelegate". This effectively broke the Core Data tutorial at Cocoa Dev Central. There are now two versions
Nov 18 — 7
I just encountered a situation where I was added NSManagedObject instances to a context and the data did not automatically show up in a bound NSArrayController/table view. I think there's an elusive bug to be found here, but the workaround is to
Nov 17 — 0
RedHerring is running a story based on a article by Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates. The article suggests that the "halo effect" may not be valid because "we are now in an upgrade cycle in which the Apple faithful buy new systems." Putting aside the arguably derogatory nature of the "faithful" adjective, I just don't think the numbers support
Nov 14 — 5
By default, NSImageCell's scaling strategy can produce some unpleasantly sharp edges. I looked at a bunch of different solutions to this using the existing API, but finally settled on a simple subclass. You can
Nov 11 — 7
Did this sneak in with 10.4.3, or has this been around for a bit longer? Take a look at the screenshot
Nov 11 — 12
As a follow-up to the previous article on NSWorkspace and applications, we're going to take a look at how to use NSWorkspace to deal with files. You can think of NSWorkspace's file management as a Cocoa-front end to the type of functions offered by the Finder (although NSWorkspace predates the Finder). First, let's take a look at the basic task of
Nov 08 — 9
There's a lot of news today about CBS and NBC selling video content via Comcast. Several media outlets have compared Comcast's $1 fee to the $2 price at iTunes, but practically no one has mentioned that you actually get to keep the videos you download from iTunes
Nov 04 — 3
I took a look at this story at the Guardian earlier today, which relates Apple's decision to not license the Mac to the current state of things with the iPod. There have a been a number of stories with the same general conclusion: not licensing the Mac was a mistake and Apple should license its music products. That's the mainstream, headline-only wisdom about the history of the Mac, but I think it's wrong and really misses the point
Nov 03 — 7
So I played around with Yahoo Maps for a little while. It's clear that they're trying to meet or beat Google Maps, but it may be a losing battle. But first, what's good? I like the live traffic feature
Nov 02 — 5
What follows is a bunch of little things from today that don't justify individual posts or aren't guaranteed to be interesting to anyone but me. I updated to Mac OS X 10.4.3. Spotlight searches are much, much faster on my Mac mini now. The encrypted iChat conversations for .Mac members seem interesting, and apparently you can use the same cert to sign your emails? There's a lot in this
Nov 01 — 1
I'm in the midst of cleaning up some minor formatting things and testing links and such, but bleeding edge Theocacao readers can take a look at the two newest Cocoa Dev Central articles. Brian Christensen has written a two-part tutorial on writing screen savers
Nov 01 — 13
Unless I'm missing something, ActiveRecord's validates_length_of doesn't really work as expected with numeric attributes. For example
Oct 31 — 11
Setting attribute values in Rails is harder than I'd expect it to be. With Core Data/Cocoa, I'd do something like this pseudocode-ish code
Oct 30 — 3
I'm stumped at to why Ruby's gsub() method works the way it does. Take a look at this following snippet
Oct 28 — 2
A Wired article has some quotes from Nicholas Carr, a professional journalist. Wired talks to him about Wikipedia, and it's interesting how somebody in his position looks at the idea of citizen journalists. Here's what Wired quotes him as saying
Oct 28 — 1
This story on MacNN talks about how Mac users who attempt to apply for a job at the American Express site are told that "the system does not support Mac environments." The question is
Oct 27 — 15
In a continuation of the Cocoa Snippets experiment, we're going to talk about the basics of NSWorkspace in several parts. First, we're going to look at how you can use this class to work with other applications
Oct 27 — 7
There was an easily-missed but somewhat significant cosmetic change (at least to design folks) in iTunes 6. I meant to mention it earlier, and somebody else has probably posted about it by now. Just in case, though, here are are iTunes 5 and 6, side-by-side
Oct 27 — 3
GUIdebook is one of my favorite computer dork sites. It has an ever-expanding library of screenshots, advertising and cultural items for operating systems, hardware and applications. In some cases, the coverage is exhaustive, such as showing dozens of dialogs boxes from every version of Photoshop on both Mac and Windows. Particularly interesting is the growing coverage of some less-than-maintream products
Oct 25 — 10
The new Theocacao design is up. I'm including a screenshot for historical reasons. I tried all sorts of different looks before settling on this one. Eventually, I realized I needed a break from the explosion of hyper-modern sites. The idea is to to cleanse the palate a bit. The version I saw in my mind's eye actually looks pretty close to what you see here
Oct 25 — 0
I just played through the Shadow of the Colossus demo disc, which took about 20 minutes. Without even checking, I can tell this is done by the folks that made Ico, one of my favorite games ever. The design in colussus is brilliant. An expansive, seamless landscape
Follow your bliss.
