andymatuschak.org » Asides

WWDC!

Andy Matuschak — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:41:51 +0000

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.

Mac Developer RoundTable on User Interface

Andy Matuschak — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 19:52:40 +0000

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.

Why You Care

Andy Matuschak — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:16:07 +0000

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 Multiple Return Values!

Andy Matuschak — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 06:58:53 +0000

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, #, #]

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

RubyCocoa 0.13.0!

Andy Matuschak — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 01:31:01 +0000

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
=> #

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

Ohman, Scripting Bridge is so cool

Andy Matuschak — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:48:02 +0000

RubyCocoa + Scripting Bridge =

require ‘osx/cocoa’
include OSX
require_framework ‘ScriptingBridge’
iTunes = SBApplication.applicationWithBundleIdentifier:
	‘com.apple.iTunes’
iTunes.playpause
puts "Now playing: #{iTunes.currentTrack.name}"

CandyBar!

Andy Matuschak — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:47:58 +0000

Panic’s released CandyBar 3 with some absolutely gorgeous web design. Check it out for some great UI, both in and out of the app.

As a side note, it seems to use some kind of in-house update mechanism that isn’t Sparkle.

F-Script Anywhere for Leopard

Andy Matuschak — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 06:18:25 +0000

I’d like to draw your attention to F-Script Anywhere, now available for Leopard. Excellent for those of us who frequently find ourselves wondering: “how exactly did they do that?”

Apple Updated its Documentation

Andy Matuschak — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 22:52:02 +0000

Apple finally updated its documentation for the first time in the last few months. Make sure you check out what’s new, especially the AppKit and Foundation release notes.

Cocoa Browser SN for Leopard Available

Andy Matuschak — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:50:30 +0000

Cocoa Browser SN, the app I recommended in the Cocoa meta-tutorial, is now available for Leopard. Excellent—I’d been running a version I’d hacked together to be compliant.