“A list of things that you must do for every app. Most of these should be done up front; some can be put off a little bit; some can be put off a long time, but ought to be done at some point rather than put off into the indefinite future.”
(Via Domain of the Bored.)
I’d agree with all of Peter’s comments- I can’t stress point 1 enough!
First 75 days of Wii Transfer: “In the tradition of other independent Mac developers such as Mike Zornek, Daniel Jalkut, and Gus Mueller, I’m going to share some sales information from the first 75 days of Wii Transfer.”
(Via Manton Reece.)
Well done Manton, I can only hope that my first product will do as well as yours!
Automator was introduced with the launch of Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), so I’m fairly late in discussing it here. However a recent post to my local Mac User Group’s mailing list got me interested. The simple question was “Is it possible to monitor a web page for changes?”.
I’m a big fan of the terminal, so I knocked together a quick shell script to check the page and mail me if anything had changed. I then thought, I’ll just run this every x minutes as a cron task. This would be fine for me, however I then began to think about less technical users- how could I package the script for them? A user on the mailing list had suggested an AppleScript, so I could have rewritten the shell script in AppleScript putting in an infinite loop to allow it to check periodically. I hate AppleScript (I’ll leave that for another post), so that option was immediately out.
Then it struck me- why don’t I create an Automator task for the action?
I had seen the sneaky option for a Shell Script Automator Action:
I thought I’d just sit down, cut and paste my script and be done before dinner…and I was!
The whole experience of creating my own Automator action was great. I referred to the Automator Programming Guide for required information, and surprisingly the whole thing took a little over an hour.
Then Automator’s only weakness became apparent. I searched high and low for a way to repeat workflows periodically. There was none in sight, and I was back to square one. I did come across the third-party Automator Loop Utility which serves the purpose.
In short I like Automator a lot. The ease of development of custom actions is fantastic and the developer’s documentation is well-writen (as always). But I refuse to love Automator until it will repeat my tasks automatically.
Technorati Tags:
OS X, Shell Script, Automator
I’ve recently wondered about how to recursively count the number of lines within a series of files within a directory hierarchy. The command that I came up with is:
wc -l `find . -name \*.java -print`
The output is very readable, since it prints both the filename and the number of lines.
Enjoy!
Technorati Tags:
Terminal, Shell Script
Dave Batton at Mere Mortal Software has produced an excellent tutorial on developing an Apple mail-style interface. To develop the interface he has brought together useful classes from a whole bunch of awesome developers. Well done Dave, I hope you write more tutorial style articles in the future!
Technorati Tags:
Cocoa, Interface Builder
I was sorry to hear about the recent events at the Big Nerd Ranch. Just prior to their excellent Cocoa course all of the equipment was stolen and the classroom was burnt down. Well done to Emily and Jaye for getting things organized so quickly. I hope that you guys are back on track soon!
I picked up this tip when I was beginning to work with Ruby on Rails and Subversion. I added the following alias to my .profile file
alias svnaddall=’svn status | grep “^\?” | awk “{print \$2}” | xargs svn add’
This command takes all files in the present directory and flags them to be added in the next commit. This saves adding each of the files one-by-one. You don’t just have to use the command for Rails either- use it for everything. I do!
Technorati Tags:
OS X, Ruby on Rails, Subversion
I’ve just found out about a really neat trick at creativebits. If you hold the option key and drag you can select a freeform area of text. Cool!
Technorati Tags:
OS X
I’ve just come across some cool background images courtesy of Adam Betts. I like a nice plain background, and this hits the spot for me!
I’ve already gushed about how I’m learning to love Interface Builder but there are still some things that I find annoying.
If Interface Builder is supposed to be WYSIWYG editor, then why can’t I create my toolbar in Interface Builder? I could then preview my complete user interface in Interface Builder. Why on Earth should I be expected to write *so much* code to accompany a mock-up of demo GUI?
It took me ages to get the hang of those darn springs! Is the fixed position relative to the enclosing view or the window? How many people get caught out by this every day? I actually think that the spring metaphor is a good one, but I think its detail as presented in the sizing window of the inspector could be more clear.
In the first instance I think that using a standard widget set is fantastic. This provides fantastic consistency between applications, and really reduces the burden on the user. So why does Apple insist upon changing the look of an app at every release? Take the latest iTunes for example, with its darker toolbar. It looks different to Mail, which both look different to Safari’s metal toolbar. Each time Apple releases a new look the independent developers rush to produce something “similar” such that their app is not deemed to look obsolete.
Is anybody actually following these anymore? John Gruber doesn’t think we should blindly follow them. Daniel Jalkut has a great article on where we go from here. As mac users we’re spoilt for great looking and easy to use GUIs. But I have to ask why does Apple insist on
writing the Human Interface Guidelines when they themselves violate them so frequently. I struggle to think of a single Apple application that obeys all of the HIG.
In short, I am learning to combine the visual approach with a hand-coded approach. There are a lot of things that Interface Builder does well, especially when combined with bindings. However, I can’t help but feel that Interface Builder in its present state is only half the tool it could have been.
Technorati Tags:
Cocoa, Interface Builder