Suffix

Building a 64-bit prefpane

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:06:36 +0100

The System Preferences application on Mac is universal since Snow Leopard: it can run in 32-bit or 64-bit but not at the same time. That's why you have to restart the application when you want to open an older Preference Pane.

Today I tried to upgrade the LazyPoken prefpane as it was still a 32-bit build and the next Mac OS X will probably no longer support the 32-bit System Preferences application. That turned out to be a little harder as expected.

Build settings

First of all you should change your project ARCH flags to tell the gcc compiler it should build for 64-bit. You can do this in Project → Edit Project Settings, choose the Build tab and look for the Architectures or ARCHS parameter. Choose the 64-bit or Universal mode (if you need to support Tiger).

This is not enough however. If you try to build and install your application you'll notice it's still running in 32-bit, stubborn prefpane.

The 64-bit System Preferences application also uses garbage collection and all 64-bit prefpanes need to support this as well. You can enable this in the same build panel under the Objective-C Garbage Collection or GCC_ENABLE_OBJC_GC parameter. Choose the Supported or Required option, again, depending on what you want to support.

Clean and build your application again, check for warnings and try it out. Looking better now?

64-bit gotchas

Sparkle: make sure to include the With Garbage Collection version of Sparkle, you just activated garbage collection remember?
Older frameworks: make sure the frameworks your application depends on compile in 64-bit mode. The Developer Tools installed with Xcode include a tool to check your code for possible 64-bit incompatibilities. Read the Converting an Existing Application to 64-Bit documentation.

Still running into problems? Read the Updating Preference Panes for Snow Leopard and Beyond article from Apple's Preference Pane Programming Guide.

How many days in a month

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:37:42 +0100

The following returns the amount of days in a given year and month, including leap years.

(Date.new(year, 12, 31) << (12-month)).day

The beauty of Ruby.

Credits to Tim Morgan for his snippet.

Multi size default images with paperclip

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 12:06:27 +0100

I needed some avatar images in a recent Ruby on Rails project. File uploading in Rails is never easy but the paperclip gem makes it so much easier.

Now, paperclip has a fallback method when an image is missing. Defining the default image saves you from writing duplicate tests in your views to handle the missing image cases. You can specify the default URL like this:

has_attached_file :avatar, :default_url => '/images/avatar_missing.png'

So far so good but what if you need a specific image for each avatar size? Not that hard either:

has_attached_file :avatar, :styles => {:small => '30x30#', :large => '100x100#'}, :default_url => 'missing_:style.png'

All you need is 2 images for the missing avatars, one small one of 30×30 pixels and another larger one of 100×100 pixels. Named missing_small.png and missing_large.png respectively.

Sync data with Dropbox

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:37:37 +0100

When you have multiple Macs – like your laptop and a desktop computer or home and office computer – it's hard to access your files from another computer. Ever tried mailing files to yourself? Dropbox is a free application that synchronizes files immediately to all your computers over the intertubes. You can even access the files via their website.

Sync application data

So far so good but what to do with application data like your contacts in Address Book, your Things to do list, your ShoveBox notes or anything else with a database for that matter? Symlinking is the answer!

You can't sync a folder outside of the Dropbox folder and all these application databases live, well, outside of the Dropbox folder. Most applications store their data in the Library folder (in /Library/Application Support/ or ~/Library/Application Support/). The trick is to move the databases to your Dropbox folder while the application still thinks it's somewhere in your Mac's Library folder.

We'll need some command line stuff to get this done so backup your data. I'll say this once more and still you won't listen but, please BACKUP your data before doing this.

Moving data

I'll use the Address Book library as an example. Close Address Book first! Drag the folder with the application data (~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook) to some Dropbox folder (e.g. ~/Dropbox/ApplicationSupport/AddressBook). You can choose the name of the destination directory the way you want.

At this moment Dropbox will be syncing your Address Book data to all your computers with Dropbox installed. Great, but we still need to trick Address Book as we moved its database. Let's create a symbolic link from the old location to the new Dropbox folder. In Terminal:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/ ln -s ~/Dropbox/ApplicationSupport/AddressBook/ AddressBook

You created a link from the old location to the new one. You should see the little Dropbox status icon on the folder in your ~/Library/Application Support folder. That's good. Open Address Book and check to see if all your contacts are still there. Yes? Good, now create a similar link on your other computer (don't forget to close Address Book). I simply removed the Address Book library on my other computer... the whole purpose is to have the same data on both computers off course but please make sure there is nothing important there.

What's not cool

I wouldn't run both applications at the same time, you'll probably screw up your data! Address Book doesn't know it's using a ‘shared’ library so if both applications want to write changes at the same time things will go foobar.

Other applications

I see no reason why this wouldn't work for other applications. I'm happily using this method for Address Book, Things, ShoveBox and Little Snapper.

RuPy 2009 roundup

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:57:14 +0100

Back from a few days in Poznań, Poland with the Belighted team for the RuPy 2009 conference. RuPy is a two day conference about Ruby and Python. It's the Ruby stuff we wanted to see.

Cells and Apotomo

One note wothy talks was the one by Michał Łomnicki and Nick Sutterer about Cells and Apotomo, Rails plugins for creating reusable web components. It's one of those things you don't immediately use but may be useful in a certain project. Still not sure if I'll ever use it but it looks a fairly simple solution to build interactive components.

RabbitMQ

The second day started with Paolo Negri with RabbitMQ, a messaging system based on the AMQP standard. It's platform neutral with lots of different packages and bundles to bind it with your favorite language (like Ruby). It's a way to exchange massages with a queuing system and looks really interesting. Sounds like a nice solution to replace own made batch queuing systems and is definitely more scalable. Worth to keep an eye on.

Mastering Git

The next one was Scott Chacon from GitHub. It's one of the more ‘traditional’ subjects compared with the previous two but the one we were all looking forward to and Scott did not disappoint: I finally understand why Git is better as SVN (insert lousy comments here). He started of with some SVN bashing to make his point and went on with a Git ninja training and what makes GitHub a great repository for sharing open source projects. Scott is a good speaker and knows how to get and keep the attention, this was definitely the best talk of the conference. Some things I'll try to remember:

Subversion keeps diffs, Git stores snapshots.
Git is faster and more efficient in disk space usages as SVN.
Branch often and use it as ‘environments’, switch contexts when needed.
Git (almost) never removes data.
You can start a clone and work on it without access rights from the owner, this helps collaboration.
It's frictionless (non linear): branch fast, merge it when done and remove the branch.
Read his free book: Pro Git.

Here is a quick example on how to create branch easily in Git:

git init # create a local repository git branch # shows the current branch git branch blue # creates a new branch called blue git checkout blue # switches to the blue branch # write some code git merge blue # merge this branch with the master git branch -d blue # removes the blue branch

Make sure to take a look at the git commit --amend, git blame <filename>, git blame -C <filename> and git bisect commands.

Also a big thanks to the CSS Ninja's for hanging out with us, it was nice meeting you guys.

Do zobaczenia!

Belgian iPhone apps

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:01:42 +0200

CocoaHeads Belgium is a new initiative to bring Cocoa enthusiasts together. The first meeting is scheduled on September 28, 2009 at the IBBT offices.

This occasion seemed a good excuse to start a list with all Belgian iPhone applications, commercial or not, useful or utterly useless, French, Dutch or English. The application needs to be available in the App Store and designed or developed by a Belgian. Feel free to add applications in the comments so that I can update this list accordingly.

Apps

7am by milkcarton	iTunes Product page
Alien Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Armenian Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Bali Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Base-5 Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Be Tv by Emmer Inc.	iTunes Product page
Belgium Zip by Peter Elst	iTunes
Binary Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Birthday Reminder (Lite) by Netwalk	iTunes Product page
Borg Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Braille Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Cuneiform Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Elvish Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Finger Twister by Netwalk	iTunes Product page
Ge'ez Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Greek Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Hebrew Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Hex Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Hieroglyph Clockp by Peter Elst	iTunes
Hylian Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
iPuke by Peter Elst	iTunes
Keypoint by Bert Timmermans	iTunes Product page
Khmer Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Klingon Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Laundry Day by websIT	iTunes Product page
Lekker in de Buurt by Steven Teerlinck	iTunes Product page
Mayan Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Movies by Netwalk	iTunes Product page
myBooks by Netwalk	iTunes Product page
myGames by Netwalk	iTunes Product page
N'Ko Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Next Door Girls by Netwalk	iTunes Product page
Octal Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Oak by 10to1	iTunes Product page
Radio.be by Nicolas Braem	iTunes Product page
Roman Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Romulan Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Sinhala Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Snabiz by Netwalk	iTunes Product page
Hotspot locator by Telenet	iTunes Product page
Tamil Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Thai Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Tibetan Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Touring Mobilis by Roving Bird	iTunes Product page
Trein België by Wasabi Apps	No longer available Product page
Twunch by milkcarton	iTunes Product page
Urnfield Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Unix Clock by Peter Elst	iTunes
Vandaag.be by Telenet	iTunes Product page
VAT validator by Peter Elst	iTunes
VRadio by Werner Ramaekers	iTunes

Rails Rumble reflections

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:02:25 +0200

RailsRumble is a 48 hour web appliction development competion. Your team gets one weekend to design, develop and deploy the best web application possible. We were crazy enough to give it a shot.

Idea-list

We were planning to build a questionaire app but the day before the competition started we decided to change plans. We often have these “We want to build something, what application would be useful?” discussions. At such moments we can't come up with good ideas while during the day we often have ideas about great applications the world is still missing. Well, now there is an app for that: Idealist.

Idealist is our entry for the competition. It's a dropbox for ideas. Have an idea? Write it down and let it boil there for a while. Others can look through the ideas and comment on them hopefully resulting in better ideas after a while (or maybe it makes you realize why it may not have been such a good idea after all).

Competition

It's great fun! If you know/want to learn Ruby on Rails I would certainly recommand to compete next year. I learned a lot, like installing a full Rails stack in 3 hours to name one. The best part for me is the atmosphere: both in the team and online (Twitter and IRC). For 48 hours it looks like the whole world is writing code and eating pizza.

What I don't like: our preparations sucked. We didn't think it through which results in a application without a clearly defined goal: it's not obvious how it works or why you would use it. This could be better. Some other do's & don'ts: don't upgrade your Rails version in the middle of the competion, know which gems to user and try them out, have an idea of the website structure and focus on the core features (we lost way too much time with the Twitter OAuth integration).

Roadmap

To the end of the competion the code got a little messy. After the voting round is over we plan to refactor the code, fix the structure and add a Facbook like ‘like’ feature. Once this is done we can move the whole thing to some server and open it up for everyone.

Hope to see you next year as a RailsRumble competitor!

Moving my ISP: from Telenet to Dommel

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 18:36:28 +0200

Belgium has two major internet providers: Belgacom and Telenet (my current provider). As their mid-range internet packages are quite expensive I went looking for something else.

Price

Dommel has been a hosting provider for a long time and now they offer internet as well. They were disruptive as they were the first (as far as I know) to offer unlimited data traffic in Belgium for reasonable prices. Let's compare the “Cityconnect Lite” package from Dommel with the “Internet Go” from Belgacom and “ExpressNet” from Telenet. These packages are chosen for their data limit: somewhere between 20 and 30 GB will do for me. You may want to compare different packages.

	Belgacom	Telenet	Dommel
Type	ADSL	Cable	ADSL
Downstream	12 Mbps	15 Mbps	24 Mbps
Upstream	1 Mbps	?	3 Mbps
Data limit	25 GB	25 GB	30 GB
Price / month	€ 41,75	€ 42,91	€ 14,99 + € 9,95

Dommel needs a fixed line which you'll have to rent from Belgacom if you don't have one. The cheapest line Belgacom offers is the Discovery line for € 9,95 a month.

After one year (promotions and installation costs not included) Belgacom would cost me € 501, Telenet € 514,92 and Dommel € 299,28. Moving to Dommel would save me € 215 / year.

Dommel support

So where is the catch? The catch is the support desk. Dommel is infamous for its lack of support: e-mails stay unanswered, the helpdesk is understaffed, administration is a disaster, etc. In short: if you don't know how to configure a modem and have no idea what an IP address is, stay away from Dommel and go to one of the big players. There is no one to install your modem and you can only call the helpdesk during office hours (= when you connection goes down on Friday evening you'll have to wait till Monday to call someone).

Moving

Not scared yet? Here is what you need to do to move to Dommel.

If you don't have a fixed line at home get a Discovery line from Belgacom. You can ask Dommel to do this for you as well but they'll charge € 13,31 per month whereas Belgacom ‘only’ charges € 9,95 per month. I went to my local Belgacom store and they activated the line 2 days later.
Once your line is activated go to the Dommel website and order your connection. The order script will check your line to see what's available. The script will ask the “do you have a Belgacom line” over and over again when the line isn't activated yet, don't worry, try again later.
You'll get two mails once you complete the registration. A confirmation mail with a contract you'll have to sign and send back. The other one with a request of domiciliation (because I asked for it).
Next you should get a pro forma invoice you'll have to pay. I paid it a soon as possible (the same day). My payment was accepted the next day.
Once Dommel receives your payment they'll activate the connection, configure your ADSL modem with the settings they sent you.
Their last e-mail also mentioned the activation date, 4 days after they accepted my payment.
You'll need an ADSL modem. The Telenet modem is a cable modem so this one won't work. Get one while you are waiting for Dommel to activate your line. Be careful, you'll need a ADSL2+ annex A/M compatible modem for Dommel, make sure it's the right one. Dommel sells one as well but it's a little expensive. You can find one for ±€45.
Exactly 4 days later my line was activated, as promised. Some fiddling with the modem and... online!

It will take a month or so to cancel your Telenet subscription so you could do that in advance but make sure to have a short overlap if you don't want to loose your internet connection before the Dommel one is activated.

Troubleshooting

Some things to try when it isn't working as it should.

Is your modem compatible? Check if it's annex A/M compatible, for a CityConnect subscription that is. I bought a Hercules modem which seemed compatible if you look at the specs but it is not. I wasted 4 days with this one and now I'm using my dad's old ADSL modem which is not ADSL2+ compliant. It works, but only at 6 Mbps.
Does you line synchronizes? There should be a LED on the modem to show the status. The line should sync before you try anything else. If not: do you have splitters if needed? Is the modem as close to the first telephone plug as possible? Aren't you too far away from the telephone exchange?
Can you connect to Dommel? Do you get a WAN IP (is not the same as an internal IP)?
Reset your modem after Dommel activates your line, it really does help.

Extra resources

Dommel's CRM management panel.
Questions? Head over to userbase.be, the forum for Dommel questions (in Dutch).

This article was based on an article (in Dutch) by Karl Leenknegt. Check out the comments to get some reactions of happy and angry customers with their stories (also in Dutch).

Favorite iPhone apps

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:45:26 +0200

Some of my friends recently bought an iPhone and they often ask which apps they should install. Last year I made a list with “Mac apps for switchers” so here is my “Favorite iPhone” apps list.

Free apps

Shazaam

Has been around for ages and one of the first apps I installed. Shazaam records a few seconds of a song you are listing to in a pub, a party, on the radio,... analyses the recording and tells you the artist, title and album. It even keeps a list of all your recordings and links to the iTunes or YouTube version. For me it's a great reminder of which songs I liked. Shazaam works great if there isn't too much background noise, but I can hardly blame Shazaam for that.

Facebook

Another classic one. First app installed on my phone and still on the home screen. I hardly ever use the Facebook website anymore, checking the latest status updates and photos from my iPhone is what I need and this app does this without all the annoying requests.

Skype

You can make calls (over Wi-Fi, 3G and EDGE are not supported) or chat as you would expect. It's promising and the test we did was impressive (switching between desktop and iPhone), quality was great as well, and still... I almost never use it. There are not background applications on the iPhone so you need to have Skype running to receive calls and that's where it goes wrong. I still hope they will add push notification support so that you get a pop-up for an incoming call and can open Skype only when you need to.

T.Mobilis

Not my favorite application from a design perspective and only useful when you happen to be in Belgium but the data is good. It shows a map of the Belgian highway network with a traffic incidents overlay, showing: roadworks, accidents and traffic jams. I know, this should be included in Google Maps but isn't (yet). Let's hope this app will be redundant in the future.

WiFi Checker

~~Scans for wireless access points and checks if the open ones have a free internet connection (and not some “pay here” holding page). Useful to find some internet juice when abroad.~~ This one is not OS 3 ready (yet). This was the only app in his kind at the time so I should check again if there aren't any better alternatives available today (WiFiTrack for example).

Paying apps

Tweetie

Tweetie is a €2,39 Twitter client. It's well designed, fast and supports multiple Twitter accounts. I like it's simplicity and speed but there are free alternatives if you want: Twitterrific (iTunes link) or TweetDeck. Birdhouse looks nice as well, but haven't tried it yet.

Flight Control

Something different: a game! You have to draw lines from the planes to their landing strips and make sure they don't crash into one another. It's as simple as that. You can choose between multiple airports and there is even a multi-player mode but it's the simplicity that makes it great. No learning curve, lovely graphics and addictive as hell. Firemint released their sales results in April 2009: in less than 2 months they earned $700.000! Impressive for a €0,79 app.

Things

Things is a task list app, I use it to keep track of things I have to do. There are hundreds of these apps in the app store but Things Touch is the iPhone version of its bigger brother Tings for Mac which I already use. I like it but €7,99 may be a little too expensive for what it's worth.

Cha-Ching

A €2,39 finance app I use to keep track of my expenses. The design looks good and it's nice to use. Same comment as for Things really, I use Cha-Ching for iPhone as I have been using the desktop version for a while and syncing is what I want. Cha-Ching is still a little buggy and they change their design more as they change the code (so to speak) but I'm using the beta so shouldn't complain. Check Squirrl as well, it's comparable to Cha-Ching.

Updating bundles with Sparkle

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:33:57 +0200

Did you ever use the Sparkle framework in your Cocoa applications? It's a great framewok that makes it easy for end-users to update your Mac OS X applications when a new version is released. We use it for Lustro, our first Cocoa application. It's fairly easy to install and well documented. The problem is I needed it for a Cocoa bundle (also called a non-app bundle): a preference pane we want to install in the Mac OS X System Preferences.

The Sparkle documentation has some bundle installation instructions but my Cocoa level is not good enough to understand the different steps. Let's see how we can activate Sparkle for our own bundle, step by step (I'm using version 1.5 b6 here).

Basic setup

Start with the first step from the Basic Setup guide. This step is the same for normal applications or non-app bundles.

Build the interface

Open up your NIB file in Interface Builder.
Go to ‘File → Read Class Files...’ and choose all the files inside Sparkle.framework/Headers.
Drag a generic Object (a blue cube) from the Library to your document.
Select this object in your document window, and under the Information tab of the inspector, set the class of the object to SUUpdater.
If you'd like, make a ‘Check for Updates...’ menu item in the application menu. Set its target to the SUUpdater instance and its action to checkForUpdates:.

Bundle specific setup

Now import the Sparkle header in your own header class with:

#import <Sparkle.h>

We need to instantiate the SUUpdater in our code, something that you don't need to do for a full blown application. I added the following to my awakeFromNib method (that method will be loaded when the user opens your preference pane).

- (void)awakeFromNib { SUUpdater *updater = [SUUpdater updaterForBundle:[NSBundle bundleForClass:[self class]]]; [updater setAutomaticallyChecksForUpdates:YES]; [updater resetUpdateCycle]; }

Custom bundle identifier

This will work but is incorrect. Sparkle will now write it's user defaults in the com.apple.systempreferences which is a wrong practice. Sparkle will get confused as soon as 2 or more bundles use this method (the will use the same variables). You'll need to point Sparkle to identifier specific for you bundle. Luckily we can tell Sparkle to use our bundle:

[NSBundle bundleWithIdentifier:@"com.you.yourbundle"]

Replace the ‘com.example.yourbundle’ with your own bundle identifier.

User defaults

Start your bundle and click the update button. Close the System Preferences and check the user defaults to see if it works. There is a nice command in Mac OS X called ‘defaults’ that can read these user defaults for you (be sure to close the application first as it will only write the new settings to disk when the application closes). Open Terminal and type:

defaults read com.example.yourbundle

Look for ‘SU-’ prefixed parameters. Do you see them? That should be all for today. You can have a look in our code to see how the end result looks like.