Whenever I'm asked how I got interested in computers, I relate this story:
When I was about ten years old, my father took me to an IBM open house. Dad worked for IBM during its heyday, when it was the biggest computer company in the world and would seemingly control …
Yesterday, I attended iPhone Camp Atlanta 2009, a conference for iPhone developers and others interested in iPhone development (business/marketing people). At the same time and in the same venue, Mobile Camp Atlanta 2009 was taking place, targeting developers for Blackberry, Android, Palm Pre, and Windows Mobile.
The conference was …
My Menubar Countdown application uses an NSStatusItem to display itself in the menu bar. I recently had to add a custom view to that status item, and thought I'd share what I learned about the process here.
A little background: a status item is one of those little thingees you …
While learning about Core Animation, I was disappointed to find that it is plagued by the anti-pattern that I call the Overly Generic Interface.
The Overly Generic Interface is an interface that provides a very small set of functions, but each function takes parameters that allow one to do a …
Either I’m stupid, or Apple’s developer documentation sucks. Whenever I try to enter a new area of Cocoa development, I am presented with simplistic tutorials and detailed reference information, with little in between to bridge the gap between newbie and expert. Often, the only way to learn an …
In case you're curious: here's what you'll see if you rescue your iPhone from a hot car:
Appel d'urgence indeed!
Most programmers know that having functions with too many parameters can be confusing. However, fixing such problems requires some intelligence. A programmer once saw some code like this:
SetObjectParams(obj, foo, bar, baz, quux, xyzzy, abra, cadabra, hocus, pocus, presto, shazam);
Finding a stylistic rule somewhere that said a function …
Menubar Countdown is a simple countdown timer that displays itself on the right side of the Mac OS X menu bar.
Version 1.2 has these new features:
When I released Menubar Countdown 1.1, I whipped up an application icon by simply taking a screenshot of the menu bar and cropping it. The application icon looked like this:
Fugly, eh? Not only is it ugly, but the narrow shape makes it hard to recognize as an icon …
One of my clients, whose e-mail system I have to use, uses a product called ESATInformer to filter spam. I don't understand exactly what the benefit of this system is.
When the system receives suspected spam, it keeps that spam message on the server, but it sends me an e-mail …