Solipsism Gradient

Posted by pablowestenh:
its extremely quiet in here

post some interesting topic guys

Just published a droplet application that fixes the spelling error in nibs produced by my previous (beta) version of the RBSplitView Interface Builder plugin. Details on the RBSplitView page.

pablowestenh wrote:

its extremely quiet in here

post some interesting topics guys

Somehow this makes me ask: are you sure you’re in the right place?

…anyway: there’s no “guys” plural here, only myself; and only I can post topics; others can just reply/comment. I do plan to report on my work progress Real Soon Now, though.

I seem to have boarded the latest bandwagon du jour. They seem to come at progressively shorter intervals these days – the last one was just two days ago. In other news, serious work today has again been successfully averted…

(This was a good question asked of me at formspring.)

So far, I haven’t done anything for the iPhone, for three reasons.

First, I don’t own a cellphone, and I find it quite difficult to write an app that I won’t use myself. I do have an iPod Touch, and I carry it with me on trips, but it seems I use it strictly as an alarm clock and as a normal iPod – the only apps I have installed are PCalc Lite and the Flycast internet radio. I look at other apps now and then, without finding any that give me that “wow I need that” thrill. (For the record, I’ve also owned the first Newton, the first Palm Pilot, and the Sony Magic Cap – all with their development SDKs – and I couldn’t think of a single useful app for them either; I suppose it’s a mental deficiency.) Also, recall that where I live there’s very little public WiFi, and 3G charges are ruinous… any app I’d use would need to work offline 99% of the time, which narrows things down considerably.

Second, the current AppStore model is extremely different from what I’m comfortable with – ideally, I want to distribute and support it myself, and be able to post updates immediately, without waiting for approval from anybody else.

Third, my main interest is in writing utilities – applications that extend or change the way “the system” or other applications do things. There’s no space whatsoever for that on the iPhone, and it doesn’t look like there’ll be space for it on the iPad for now.

That said, I do plan to attend WWDC 2010 and it’s possible that until June I think of some mainstream application that I’d like use myself. The larger screen could make all the difference. Send in suggestions!

So, to start things going again… I was looking at my RSS feeds for the first time in almost 5 months, and read Dan Wood of Karelia fame explaining about Converting Rich Text to TEXT/styl resources for an SLA on a Disk Image.

My own workflow for building a release disk image uses a small tool I’ve written for that. You can download it here. Here’s the help text it prints out if you run it without arguments:

   Add one license at a time to a (unflattened) disk image.
   Usage: AddLicense /path/to/TheUnflattened.dmg Language /path/to/TheLicense.rtf
   Languages supported: da nl ko ja fr it fi pt sv en es de nb
   You can also use long equivalents like English, French etc.
   The first language added will be the default language (usually English).

Here's an actual usage example from a build script:

   hdiutil unflatten "$SOURCE_ROOT/My.dmg"
   "$BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR/AddLicense" "$SOURCE_ROOT/My.dmg" English "$SOURCE_ROOT/EnglishLicense.rtf"
   "$BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR/AddLicense" "$SOURCE_ROOT/My.dmg" French "$SOURCE_ROOT/FrenchLicense.rtf"
   hdiutil flatten "$SOURCE_ROOT/My.dmg"

and I use the “flatten” and “unflatten” arguments to hdiutil to massage the disk image.

The trick (as Dan points out in his post update) is that you can use ‘RTF ‘ resources instead of TEXT/styl. I received this interesting tidbit through oral tradition; I’m not a 100% certain, but I think it was through some code that Marko Karppinen showed me a few years ago. Pass it on.

If there’s interest, I may clean up and publish the source sometime, though it uses all sort of gronky old APIs (Resource Manager etc.).

Update: the link above now downloads the complete Xcode project. I also included it on my source code page.

I just published the Xcode project for the AddLicense tool I mentioned previously. Enjoy.

Ask me anything. I may even answer. My meta-disclaimer applies in full.