Solipsism Gradient

All cat metaphors seem to have been overused already, so I’ll spare you.

If you’re developing for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), or just interested in more technical details, John Siracusa’s review is essential reading. He just about convinced me to make XRay 2 a Tiger-only application. More details on that as the ideas develop… in the meantime, I’ll probably have to do a 1.1.1 bug-fix release on the current version.

Talking of bug-fix releases, RBSplitView 1.1.1 is also in the works… if you have any suggestion or bug reports, send them in soonest.

By the way, Dan Wood just said some nice words about RBSplitView on his own weblog. Thanks, Dan!

Cocoa

Well, it took over a month, but version 1.1 of RBSplitView is now out.

Originally I was calling it 1.0.5, but several people made so many good feature requests it became clear that 1.1 would be more appropriate. Special thanks to Dan Wood, Steve Gehrman and Brad Miller for their input and help with debugging.

When I began coding on XRay 2 some months ago, I ran into severe limitations with Cocoa’s NSSplitView. After a couple of frustrating weeks to make it behave like it should, I began looking for alternatives, to no avail; so I started coding my own version.

Then, as I realized that many other people were having similar problems, and that numerous Apple applications also seemed to have their own handrolled extensions to NSSplitView, I decided to publish my source. It has been a great learning experience.

With my recent decision to attend WWDC, I think the time has come to stop fiddling around with RBSplitView and return to XRay 2, in order to have a working alpha to bug the Apple engineers with. This will be fun!

Cocoa Programming

Yes, I know, it’s been over two weeks. I’ve been holding back some posts I’ve wanted to make, since they demanded preliminary work I couldn’t do at the time… scanning stuff and processing pictures, and so on. Hopefully next week…

Meanwhile, my proposed paper for the 2005 Advanced Developers Hands On Conference has been accepted. ADHOC (formerly famous as MacHack) will happen July 27-31, 2005, in Dearborn MI (near Detroit). A great conference for Mac developers.

Regarding the paper, the working title is: “Out of the Bottle: Beyond the Genie Effect”.

One Cocoa FAQ is how to do the Genie Effect. Unfortunately, the effect itself is done behind the curtain by the Window Manager. We’ll show how to do it in a few easy steps, which will teach you how to:

1) Overlay a transparent window over the screen and draw into it

2) Use OpenGL in that window to move images around

3) Make it appear that your windows are actually doing cool stuff.

Most important, this is the first paper I’ll be doing with a coauthor: Jeff Biggus, the mild-mannered secret identity of HyperJeff (cue applause!). Jeff will be doing the OpenGL part – something about which I know very little right now – and I’ll be doing the graphic interface part. He’ll also attend the conference to present the paper, as I won’t be able to make it this year.

In other news, RBSplitView 1.0.5 is nearly ready for publication. There’s still one feature request and a couple of bugs to take care of, but I hope to have it ready over the weekend. So watch this space…

ADHOC MacHack Cocoa

As it happens, I took my old iBook on the trip and in my copious and interruption-free spare time worked on RBSplitView 1.0.4. Which is now available.

The major new thing here is animated collapse/expand. I also figured out how to undo some actions in the Interface Builder palette, and fixed this and that… just the sort of detail work that’s hard to do in the normal course of events.

Hopefully now I’ll be able to get back to work on XRay 2.0.

Cocoa Programming

Well, I was still posting about 1.0.2 when a user e-mailed in with a report about some new bugs, so here‘s a fast update.

Animation is apparently being approached asymptotically

Programming Cocoa

Details and release notes are here.

Animation isn’t in there yet, but we’re getting closer…

Programming Cocoa

Whew, this has been a long dry spell. I had one of those pesky attacks of “programmer’s block”, where a couple of silly bugs hold things up for weeks.

Fortunately I can report that it’s over and we’re seeing real progress again. Expect RBSplitView 1.0.2 to be released in 1 or 2 days…