Coffee & Cocoa hot bits and bytes

Last weekend I had some fun playing around with the remote of my MacMini which is connected to a flat screen TV. I came up with ideas about apps that should use the remote (Browser, Dock, …).

Before starting such a project I wanted to check out how to use the apple remote in a cocoa app. After some browsing in the web it was clear that there is no official API released by Apple yet. The best resource I found was on the Cocoa Dev Wiki where some guys wrote about what they already found out. Based on this work I started to develop an Objective-C class which would handle asynchronous events from the apple remote control. (more…)

Today I finally start the “give away code” section on this blog. During development of Searchlight. I faced a lot of minor and major problems. For some of them there were solutions in forums and wikis.

By all means it took time to solve these problems. As a contribution to the community I decided to give away this code. Chances are high that other people are having the same problems as I had. I also hope that people are giving me feedback about the code to be able to learn. (more…)

Last friday I got the MacBook Pro. It’s a 2GHz opt out with 2GB RAM. A lightning fast machine for all developer related tasks (especially when compared to my old Powerbook).

To use the MacBook for all programming tasks I need a number of different applications. I want them to run native on the MacBook to have the best possible performance. XCode, ruby and TextMate are universal already. For the following tools and apps there was more to do than downloading. (more…)