Coffee & Cocoa hot bits and bytes

The Academic Apple Users Austria group is starting this friday.

I’m invited to give a talk about Spotlight. The talk will about the following topics:

• Usage: Change your daily workflow with Spotlight
• Spotlight under the Hood: Techniques of your private Google
• Future: Upcoming Spotlight features in Leopard (respecting the NDA of course)

The talk will be in german. If you are around the corner I’ll be happy to see you.

Free licenses of Searchlight - Spotlight for the network and Sofa Control will be given away.

A new version of GrandPerspective has been released. I downloaded the source, configured a project and did another universal build which you can download now.

GrandPerspective 0.97 Universal Download

Note: I only did a build of GrandPerspective. I’m not involved in any means in the development of GrandPerspective. Therefore I can not help with any bugs in there

Creating a good looking interface is a lot of work. There was some discussion lately about the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and when you should break them. Daniel Jalkut has written a very nice blog entry on how he introduced his own HIG in order to improve the UI of FlexTime.

I’m not an UI designer. I get most of my ideas from playing around with other applications. One thing I learned when extending the UI is that it could take a lot of time to do so.

Inspired by the user interface of NewsFire, Mail, iPhoto, and others I wanted to display an icon and two lines of text in a single table column. Read the rest of this entry »

Often it’s hard to keep up with the all the new cool stuff. Java 6 is around the corner and only one of my projects already uses Java 5.

The same is for Cocoa. Apple is finishing Leopard while I’m still learning APIs and enhancements of Tiger. So was it today when I remembered something from the WWDC that’s called NSPredicate.

In order to find out if an application with a specific bundle identifier (unique key) is running you would do something like this:

int index;
NSArray* apps = [[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] launchedApplications];
for(index=0; index < [apps count]; index++) {
    NSString* identifier = [[apps objectAtIndex:index] 
                    objectForKey: @"NSApplicationBundleIdentifier"];
    if ([identifier isEqualToString: someIdentifier]) {
        // do something and leave for loop            
    }
}

Tiger introduced NSPredicate which is used by core data to define queries. But it can also be used to search for items in collections. So doing it with NSPredicate is as simple as this:

[NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"NSApplicationBundleIdentifier=%@",
                                 someIdentifier]];
NSArray* apps = [[[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] launchedApplications] 
                          filteredArrayUsingPredicate:predicate];
if ([apps count]==1) {
     // do something
}

The real benefit comes of course when your query is more complex. So beside using while or for to filter a collection just take a look at NSPredicate. It can make things a bit easier. Note: Tiger only

I grew up with programming languages like Pascal, C, C++ and later Java. All of these languages have a rather static type system. The compiler of these languages can do a lot of good things. It checks for example if you try to use functions that are not valid in a particular context.

These kind of static programming is good for a number of cases and perhaps it’s the best environment for many mission critical systems. At least every bug that is being found by the compiler must not be found by QA.

But this life belt comes at a cost.

Read the rest of this entry »