Sun - June 1, 2008
Dear Apple, I Love the iPhone
Yeah, I know, I said I was keeping my Palm, but
that was almost a year ago. And so much has changed since
then...
Posted at 11:29 AM Read More
Sun - July 1, 2007
Love the iPhone, Keeping my Palm
The stars aligned: my wife had been asking what
new toy I might like for my birthday, my call-dropping Sprint service reached
the end of its 3 year contract, the Palm OS was disappearing from even Palm's
own phones, and Apple had introduced the most anticipated new gadget of all
time: the iPhone. True,
my 15GB iPod still seemed to have a lot of life left in it, and nothing in
particular going against it --- but why fight fate? ...
Posted at 10:44 PM Read More
Thu - April 6, 2006
Virtualization Software for Intel-Based Macs
Yesterday I went on a bit about Apple's Boot Camp software
that enables booting into Windows, and said I'd prefer running Windows in a
virtual machine (VM) when it became available. Turns out that such software is
available today for beta testing from Parallels; here's the press
release. And according to this, it's very, very
fast, too --- if the video
isn't
faked, it's darn impressive...
Posted at 11:54 PM Read More
Sat - July 16, 2005
Number Formatting in Javascript
I released my little Firefox Counter
widget, and within two weeks the feed changed to remove the thousands
separators (commas, the U.S. and British convention). With over 70 million
downloads of Firefox now, it's a big number to view without such separators.
Javascript to the rescue...
Posted at 12:52 AM Read More
Thu - July 14, 2005
Firefox Widget Trouble? Already?
Yes and no. If you've downloaded the Firefox Counter
widget and you're not seeing an increasing count at the moment, it's
because SpreadFirefox.com --- the site that provides the counter data --- is
temporarily down...
Posted at 04:57 PM Read More
Tue - July 5, 2005
Firefox Counter Widget
With much guidance from Danny Goodman's new
Mac OS X Technology
Guide to Dashboard, graphic bits
from the Firefox
logo artists, and an RSS feed from SpreadFirefox.com, I've thrown
together my first OS X Tiger Dashboard
widget. A simple little thing, the Firefox Counter
widget just displays the minute-by-minute download count for
Firefox...
Posted at 08:12 AM Read More
Sat - June 11, 2005
UnitKit's Fate
Back in March I took a first look at unit testing
in Objective-C and a few of the options available. I chose UnitKit. Well, with the release of
XCode 2.1, Apple not only adds support for Intel processors, but also integrates
a unit testing framework, OCUnit (XCode's
release notes can be found here).
While this will expand the number of developers who embrace unit testing and
improve software quality on the Mac platform, it does call into question the
future of alternative testing frameworks like UnitKit...
Posted at 10:52 PM Read More
Tue - June 7, 2005
Intel Inside... Macintosh!
Apple's announcement that they'd be migrating
their product line to Intel processors is sure getting its share
of press. I've been reading a lot of the predictions, some good and
some rubbish, but Macworld has a FAQ
that seems to be pretty realistic...
Posted at 10:52 PM Read More
Sat - May 28, 2005
A Tiger Bite
Every so often I get to go through the fun of
installing a new operating system. Recently I installed Apple's newest version of OS X,
the 10.4 "Tiger" release, on my 700 MHz iBook. The process was quite a bit more
painful than I anticipated, thanks to a bad Tiger DVD...
Posted at 11:27 PM Read More
Thu - March 24, 2005
First Steps with Cocoa Bindings
Most programmers are familiar with the
model-view-controller pattern, or MVC for short. Model objects provide the core
program logic; view objects provide a visual representation of the data and
controls for the user to manipulate; and controller objects comprise the mess
between, coordinating the model with the view. The controller layer updates the
view when the model changes, and updates the model in response to the user's
input. With the addition of Cocoa bindings in OS X 10.3, Apple has provided
developers with a technology that can minimize --- and in simple cases even
eliminate --- writing controller code...
Posted at 05:24 PM Read More
Fri - March 18, 2005
Unit Testing in Objective-C
Having been recently exposed to unit testing in
C#, I started wondering whether unit testing frameworks were available for my
Mac work in Objective-C.
So far, I've found 4 frameworks for doing the unit testing itself, and 1 just
for the creation of mock objects. The unit testing frameworks, in no particular
order, are ObjcUnit, OCUnit, TestKit, and UnitKit; the mock object implementation
is OCMock...
Posted at 06:58 PM Read More
Tue - January 11, 2005
Apple's New Mass Appeal
I never purchased an Apple product before 2-1/2
years ago. Having started with homebrew 1802 machines, I upgraded through the
years to CP/M, DOS, and finally Windows systems, and inadvertently wound up with
a career writing software for Windows. Apple was different and unfamiliar, and
the price of entry was just too high for a machine I wasn't sure I'd like.
Starting today, the price of trying a Mac just fell through the floor with the
introduction of the Mac
mini...
Posted at 06:21 PM Read More
Mon - January 10, 2005
Delicious Monster
Wow. It's
great
to see that there are still programmers living the dream, that they're not all
grinding away writing tedious functional specs for some convoluted bag of
features that somebody thinks will magically coalesce into the next killer
app...
Posted at 07:54 AM Read More
Tue - December 28, 2004
Sockets in Cocoa
After brushes with network programming in .NET
(the System.Net.Sockets namespace) and Java (the java.net package), I assumed
that Apple's Cocoa framework would also have nice abstractions for working with
raw sockets. So far this does not appear to be the case...
Posted at 05:07 PM Read More
Fri - December 24, 2004
TinyELF Version 1.2 Released
Version 1.2 of TinyELF fixes a couple minor
problems. For full details, read the version
notes.
Posted at 12:08 AM Read More
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