My FriendFeed cocoa classes are now fully functional except including media enclosures in posts. I ended up rewriting it to use NSXMLDocument rather than PSFeed, which doesn’t involve any more code and eliminates the dependence on PubSub.
Now that that’s done, I’m digging into the Pownce API. Pownce isn’t much more complemented, but it requires an [...]
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
I’ve implemented posting in my Cocoa FriendFeed class, and I ended up rewriting the fetch methods to use a NSURLConnection rather than PubSub. I’m now using a temporary PSFeed object to parse the received data rather than maintaining PSFeed objects for all requested feeds. I could probably use a NSXMLDocument, but PSFeed seems cleaner.
Here’s [...]
I’ve been playing with the FriendFeed API in Objective C, although I don’t have anything ready for public consumption yet.
Since the fetch methods basically work like RSS feeds, they can be handled easily using PubSub. Most of the code I had to write was to decode the entries returned into something more useful. The methods [...]
It’s official: Absolute Software is sending me to WWDC, along with our other Mac programmer.
I signed up for Google’s new App Engine beta and I’ve already started looking at the APIs. It looks very clean and well-designed. I’m not too familiar with Python, but it looks like it’s fairly simple to pick up. The language itself is easy and has some nice Lisp-like features that I really like. The [...]
I haven’t had a chance to do much work on mii transfer for a long time, but now that DarwiinRemote 0.7 was released, I’m taking a look at the latest code to incorporate into Mii Transfer.
My goal in this version is to avoid modifying the WiiRemote framework, but rather to extend the classes in it [...]
I’m starting to get pretty disgusted with Drupal 6. I took another look at it today and the module compatibility situation is still dismal. Common modules like CCK and Views still aren’t fully compatible with Drupal 6. For MacMegasite, I would lose the buddy lists, user points, and custom home pages. The situation is even [...]
Rogue Amoeba has filed bug reports for many of the iPhone SDK’s limitations, including:
Allow applications to be installed at the user’s discretion, not Apple’s
Allow applications to run in background on iPhone
A MediaPicker API for accessing the iPod music files is needed
Add option to allow iPhone applications to access entire filesystem
Allow iPhone applications to access the [...]
I don’t pay much attention to Windows shareware & freeware, so I haven’t heard of G-Archiver until I read this item at Coding Horror.
I was looking for a way to back up my gmail account to a local drive. I’ve accumulated a mass of important information that I would rather not lose. During my search [...]
XCode 3.1 with the iPhone SDK includes a very interesting new compiler, llvm-gcc. This is an alternate version of the standard C compiler based on the llvm open source project for improved optimization & CPU architecture support.
I finally downloaded the iPhone SDK and I’ve been exploring it all day. However, the license has some serious restrictions which may affect our ability to develop our product for the iPhone. In particular:
3.3.1 Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished [...]
I’m debugging a piece of code (which I didn’t write) that acts as a specialized web server when I found a little gem (more like a turd). When a system call fails, it simply calls exit(0) to quit immediately with no error message and no attempt to recover. Argggh!
Thursday, February 28, 2008
David Watanabe came up with a great idea to make money on the new free version of NewsFire: include three paid-for feeds that the user cannot unsubscribe from. Site owners can bid for a spot as one of these feeds, bringing Watanabe revenue while offering a great product for free.
Recently there was an uproar when [...]
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Obsolete Skills is a wiki inspired by Scoble’s recent post listing “things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us”.
One of the “obsolete skills” listed on the wiki is assembly language programming. Although most programmers won’t write an entire application in assembly language, it’s still a very useful skill for several [...]
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One of our customers was having a strange installation problem after upgrading their Mac from 10.4 to 10.5. It turns out they reformatted the drive as a case-sensitive file system. During the installation, a utility gets downloaded from the server. The installation process specifies a pathname to execute that utility, which doesn’t match the case [...]
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Repairing permissions is considered the Mac equivalent of snake oil or waving a dead chicken. It’s usually the first thing suggested for fixing problems, although in most cases it does nothing. There are a few rare problems that it actually does fix, and I encountered one of them today.
One of our customers has been having [...]
Monday, September 24, 2007
We released a new version of LoJack for Laptops today. One of the major changes in this version is a new installer. Instead of using Apple’s installer, this is a full Cocoa application which handles user registration, assigns a serial number through a web service, and ensures that it’s calling successfully. This is the major [...]
Monday, September 17, 2007
As a developer, my least favorite thing is having to maintain backward compatibility with older systems. It keeps me from being able to use the latest features and I often have to have some code duplicated to do things differently depending on the OS version.
For example I’m using the new, preferred method with launchd [...]
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Wednesday, August 22, 2007
When writing Objective C code, never forget to have your init method return self or bad things will happen, but maybe not in a debug build. I wasted over an hour on that today when my debug build worked perfectly but a release build crashed in awakeFromNib where it was initializing a series of items [...]
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I’ve made a few improvements to my2unz.com over the weekend. I set up several color variations of the theme, and enabled theme switching. I also did some work on the iTunes module and changed the database tables slightly to add a few new features.
One of the problems with the previous version is that I considered [...]
