April 2009
81 posts
6 tags
"Nie Ma"
So it seems that there will be no more people visiting WWDC this year; it just sold out, even earlier than before. One wonders if perhaps next year Apple will rent some of the other Moscone buildings to fit everyone in? I’m sure the big halls at Moscone North/South could serve a fair few labs, at the very least.
I’m pretty lucky that I managed to get my ticket this year—it literally...
4 tags
“That’s the true cost of a poor approach to usability – it gets you a reputation...”
– Skin Deep Usability « Momentum
The inverse of this shows why Apple gets a lot more slack: because people are generally happy with their Apple computers/devices, they are willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt. With Microsoft, so many people are rubbed the wrong way as a matter of...
One of the problems with the UIKit at the moment is an issue embedding a UIWebView within a table, or indeed any type of scroll view which isn’t the web view itself. When displaying small amounts of data everything is fine; you can scroll with impunity. However, with larger amounts you will find that, after scrolling a certain way down, the content of the web view will not be rendered—...
Where's my thread?
So I’m debugging stuff & I get this weird-looking warning:
*** -[NSPathStore2 _rl]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x106fc10
Here’s the line of code which caused the error:
NSString * mode = [[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] currentMode];
Needless to say, it doesn’t look promising. Single-stepping proves that the error is coming from *this* line, not the previous one. It...
4 tags
“PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be...”
– XeePhotoshopLoader.m - xee - Google Code
This explains why Photoshop costs so much— they obviously have to pay their developers danger money.
NY Times vs. Twitter
NYTimes: Is there any thought that doesn’t need to be published?
BIZ: The one I’m thinking right now.
1 tag
“If we believe that style somehow exists independent of functionality, that we...”
– A List Apart: Articles: In Defense of Eye Candy
Sounds like the same thing Steve Jobs said when describing Apple’s attitude towards design— that it’s not just how a thing looks, it how it functions.
Squeeze Me!
AQToolkit now contains compression support !
Having seen that some other HTTP request wrapper libraries were using the zLib APIs to compress/decompress NSData objects, I figured this would be useful— if only there weren’t the overhead of having the whole data lump in memory (that 900KB gzip data? Yeah, that gets somewhat bigger at the other end). That approach also wouldn’t work...
maniacalrage:
I’m far more likely to get 15 one-star reviews when something goes wrong than I am to get 15 five-star reviews when everything goes right. Perhaps it’s just frustration speaking here, but when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, it’s hard to get excited about building an app.
The one-star...
Me: My daughter likes brocolli more than fruit & even chocolate. Yay!
Friend: She wouldn't happen to be a hamster would she?
Xcode BSD License Comment Script →
When I first started using custom header comments containing different licenses, I was using Epsilon, where I had a custom EEL script, user variables, & a keyboard shortcut to insert a header block with the appropriate Creative Commons license. Now, however, I find myself using Xcode most often, so I needed something there to save me from forever copying & editing one chunk of BSD-license...
4 tags
Apple Binary Protection tool →
This is a slightly-tweaked version of some code by Google’s Amit Singh. I’ve juggled things a little and added support for scanning through fat binaries encrypting all valid architectures in a single pass. It will automatically detect whether it’s currently encrypted or decrypted, and will apply or remove encryption as appropriate.
This uses the standard Apple Binary Protection...
…and a whole 15 minutes after I set it up, the use of Grablau Web in my theme has completely vanished. The code’s still there, the browser simply won’t use that font any more. Weird. Anyone have any ideas?
I love CSS3 web-fonts.
For those of you still seeing Helvetica Neue Light here, please go get yourself a copy of Safari or Firefox & you’ll see what I mean.
4 tags
Bush Administration Torture Memos →
Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle…
4 tags
“‘What’ ain’t no rendering engine I ever heard of! They support CSS3 in ‘What’?!”
– Safari & Firefox to IE Via soxiam, Source: Pulp Browsers by @elliottkember (via esquareda)
I can’t watch the movie scene this mimics thanks to an over-loud student cinema experience of said scene giving it some serious realism, but this rendition is excellent.
4 tags
Changes →
Things are going to change around here soon; this blog will soon be accessible only through
New Partnerships
I was recently given the immense privilege of being invited to join a new mobile…
Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey. That is all.
Following the lead of @danielpunkass, my ‘tweet on a tee’ submission: My Penis Reaches _Here_ When Fully Extended
Hey, you could just tell all your Twitter + Tumblr followers to follow me too, that would be nice :oP
The Dylan ‘Albert Hall’ is available from iTunes US but not in Canada? What gives?
Oh thank fuck for that— there *is* a manual option to transfer. Phew. Now to go back in time & use it for $100 of music bought last summer.
Heh. All that Bob Dylan music purchased on the iPhone? Won’t transfer to the desktop. Well, great.
RT @johnreppion via @neilhimself: Comic creator’s niece is missing: http://tinyurl.com/d2d93d Please RT!
Erm, @bluebirdapp moves with me when I switch spaces? Why do I even bother having a ‘messages’ space set up? Preference to disable, please.
In related news, I think I’ll be updating to OS 3b3 about now.
So @danielpunkass may be happy that he inspired a Dylan purchase, @wilshipley may be happy to hear that iPod.app died shortly thereafter. XD
So @garrettmurray has Google Analytics fixed? Wow, how’d you manage that? ;o>
I’m 32 and I’ve just started to go grey. It’s a good thing I like grey hair, eh?
Why are the final bosses in Final Fantasy games so outrageously more powerful than amything else nearby? Like 20x more than penultimate boss
I Can Haz HTML Parsur? →
So, for a little top-secret project I’m helping out with, I had a need to pull some data from a <select> list while scraping an HTML page. The original source code was a PHP script using preg_match() and preg_match_all(), but I didn’t want to pull in any regex engine larger than RegexKitLite, which doesn’t provide a high-level method doing what preg_match_all() does. My...
Today is one of the two occasions per year when my wife gets me to go to church. It also means we have to get here 40 minutes early. *sigh*
Making biały barszcz with hard-boiled eggs & kiełbasa for Easter brunch. The kitchen now smells like vinegary farts.
What’s with this new thing of putting -dealloc right at the bottom of the file, miles from -init and @synthesize declarations? Buh-huh?
Wife sees ‘Gone with the Wind’ is on TV. “Wow, *really* sucky movies,” she says. *rolls eyes*
Since @wilshipley bemoaned the lack of temp-file APIs in Cocoa yesterday, I decided to weigh in: http://bit.ly/aqtempfiles
Wow, no updates from Twitter for an hour now. *coughs* Is there anybody out there…?
Got code to update from a well-known developer today; can’t say I’m overly impressed with it. Does that mean I’m good, or just egotistical?