andymatuschak.org: Asides

I had a fantastic time at WWDC! Really exciting stuff coming out of Cupertino. I can’t wait until I can blog about it. Thanks to all who spotted me in the crowd and said hello—it’s so nice to be known!

I start my internship with Apple tomorrow. Hopefully, that won’t mean that this blog has to die. We’ll see.

I’ve just been part of an episode of Mac Developer RoundTable on user interface design today. I had a great time and got to chat with some fantastic other developers, so my thanks go out both to them and to our host, Scotty.

We covered a number of topics in the area, including the recent updates to the HIG, paper prototyping, error UIs, and—my favorite—machine learning in UIs, so you should definitely have a listen if you’re interested in user interface.

Bob Warwick has an excellent follow-up to my post last night.

He also makes a very important point:

Unless you’re a member of the small demographic that thinks “There’s gotta be something better than Safari for news feeds”, you’ll never discover NetNewsWire.

You should care about this not just because it means a better experience for users. You should care because it means more customers for you.

RubyCocoa parses Cocoa methods that return multiple values through pointer parameters! Check it out:

>> NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace.getFileSystemInfoForPath_
isRemovable_isWritable_isUnmountable_description_
type_("/Volumes/SparkleCaster/English.lproj")
=> [true, 1, 0, 1, #<NSCFString "hfs">, #<NSCFString "hfs">]

Now we’ve just got to do something about that really ugly method name…

RubyCocoa 0.13.0 is out! You can download it here, but make sure to check out what’s new.

Among the awesome new things are inspect methods for NSString, NSArray, NSNumber, NSDictionary, and others, so you can:

Aleph-One:Sparkle andym$ irb -r osx/cocoa
>> OSX::RUBYCOCOA_VERSION
=> "0.13.0"
>> OSX::NSDate.date
=> #<NSDate 2007-12-03 17:29:21 -0800>

Why isn’t this mentioned on MacOSForge::Ruby?