Launching milkcarton with Lustro

Simon Schoeters Today we launched a new website: <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/" title="Mac OS X applications and frameworks by milkcarton" class="ext" rel="me">milkcarton.be</a>. Last year we started developing a small Cocoa application but got stuck and never got to something ‘release worthy’, the half finished program was waiting there to be forgotten. A few months ago we decided to pick up where we left of and fix the design mistakes we made last year. We started from scratch and here we are, releasing our first private beta today! <h3>Lustro</h3> What is this mysterious app? It listens to the name Lustro and is a small Address Book exporter for Mac OS X Leopard. It exports all your contacts to <abbr title="Comma-separated values">CSV</abbr>, tab-delimited or hCard files or overwrites your Google Contacts with the ones on your Mac (so that you have access to all your Address Book contacts in GMail). If this sounds like something you could use you can <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/contact" title="Contact milkcarton" class="ext" rel="me">drop us a note</a> as we are still looking for beta testers. Lustro is free and open source so there is no excuse to chicken out on this one. <h3>milkcarton</h3> We didn't really have a decent home for Lustro so we decided to create a new website to host these little applications, frameworks or other bits of code we designed and will design. That's <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/" title="Mac OS X applications and frameworks by milkcarton" class="ext" rel="me">milkcarton.be</a>: hop over there to and have a look around.

2008-06-20T18:15:57+02:00

launching-milkcarton-lustro Launching milkcarton with Lustro

2008-06-20T18:15:57+02:00

Simon Schoeters Only 3 days ago we launched the first version of <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/apps/lustro" title="Lustro, export your Address Book contacts" class="ext">Lustro</a>. It took us a week between the beta testing and the final release and we fixed and enhanced quite a few things. Lustro is our little Mac OS X Leopard app to export your Address Book contacts to <abbr title="Comma-separated values">CSV</abbr>, tab delimited, hCards and Google Contacts. <h3>Google Contacts export</h3> A few months back making an application that exports your Address Book contacts to GMail sounded like a useful idea. Little the we know that Apple was working on the same thing. A few weeks before we released the beta version Apple came out with their built-in Address Book to Google Contacts export with the release of <a href="http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1141" class="ext" title="About the Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update">Mac OS X 10.5.3</a>. We are not good enough to beat Apple... not yet. We decided to keep the Google export in Lustro for the following reason (copied from the Lustro Help): <blockquote>“Address Book also synchronizes with MobileMe, Exchange, Yahoo! and Google if you enable this in the preferences. Lustro still includes the Google Contacts export as the Address Book syncing only works if you have connected an iPhone or iPod Touch before and the syncing mechanism is not perfect at the time of writing (e.g. company cards show an empty name in the GMail contacts list).”</blockquote> So there are a few smaller reasons why you would still use Lustro today, maybe we can add the photo export in the next release as Apple skipped that one as well. <h3>hCard exports</h3> The other mayor feature are the <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard" title="hCard - Microformats wiki" class="ext">hCard</a> exports. We couldn't find any hCard exporters for Apple so why not include it? We got some indirect feedback from <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/" class="fn ext">Chris Messina</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/comment72157605921180862/" class="fn ext">Brian Suda</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/comment72157605908401795/" class="fn ext">Tantek Çelik</a>, <a href="http://microformatique.com/?p=263" class="fn ext">John Allsopp</a> and <a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/people/adactio/bookmarks/scucuwumuch" class="fn ext">Jeremy Keith</a>, whow, I'm impressed! In the end I think we released Lustro a little too late for the GMail export thing, the buzz was over and lots of GMail exporters started to pop-up but the hCard export made up for that one. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/comment72157605921180862/" class="fn ext">Brian Suda</a>'s idea for a distributed hCard export sounds great. I don't think it fits in Lustro as it's the opposite way but I can see an Address Book plugin that ‘subscribes’ on hCard enabled webpages.

2008-07-03T20:02:40+02:00

lustro-out-now Lustro on the streets

2009-02-21T22:09:25+01:00

Simon Schoeters Last month I got a Poken and wrote a <a href="http://www.suffix.be/blog/do-you-poken" title="Do you Poken?" rel="me">review</a> with my first impressions which I sent to the Poken team. Following on this they told me they are working on a new interface and OAuth support, that's great guys! When you connect the Poken on Mac OS X you still have to double click the <abbr title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</abbr> file on the Poken that brings you to a webpage where you can approve or reject the contacts you collected on your Poken. This bothered me from the start and I can understand it's low on the team's priority list. So why not fix it ourselves? Jelle and I (<abbr title="Also Known As">aka</abbr> <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/" title="Tiny free open source Mac OS X apps" class="ext">milkcarton</a>) had a coding day planned so this was the perfect little app to build in a few hours. Exactly one week later we released <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/apps/lazypoken" title="LazyPoken, the autostarter for your Poken" class="ext" rel="me">LazyPoken</a>. Yes, it took a little longer than expected but we learned some extra CoreFoundation stuff in the process. It's a stupid little app really. You start it and that's it. LazyPoken sits and waits quietly in the background. When you connect you Poken it wakes up and opens the contained webpage for you. That's all, don't expect anything fabulous but if you use your Poken extensively this may save you some time. The <a href="http://svn.milkcarton.be/lazypoken/trunk" title="LazyPoken Subversion repository" class="ext">source code</a> is available in our <abbr title="Subversion">SVN</abbr> repository. Feel free to have a look at the code if you are struggling with Mac OS X daemons or agents, bundles and wrapper scripts. We wasted too much time to find out how it all works so I'll try to collect some useful hints in the upcoming posts.

2009-02-02T18:02:19+01:00

lazypoken LazyPoken, a Poken autostarter

2009-02-02T18:04:38+01:00

Simon Schoeters <a href="http://www.railsrumble.com" class="ext" title="Exterme Rails coding competition">RailsRumble</a> is a 48 hour web appliction development competion. Your team gets one weekend to design, develop and deploy the best web application possible. <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/" class="ext" title="Jelle and myself, our RailsRumble team">We</a> were crazy enough to give it a shot. <h3>Idea-list</h3> 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: <a href="http://idealist.r09.railsrumble.com/" class="ext">Idealist</a>. 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). <h3>Competition</h3> 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 (<a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23railsrumble" title="Twitter search for the #railsrumble hash tag" class="ext">Twitter</a> and <abbr title="Internet Relay Chat">IRC</abbr>). 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). <h3>Roadmap</h3> 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!

2009-08-25T10:02:25+02:00

railsrumble Rails Rumble reflections

2009-08-25T10:09:32+02:00

Simon Schoeters <a href="http://cocoaheads.be/" class="url summary ext">CocoaHeads Belgium</a> is a new initiative to bring Cocoa enthusiasts together. The first meeting is scheduled on <abbr title="2009-09-28T19:00+01:0000" class="dtstart">September 28, 2009</abbr> 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. <h3>Apps</h3> <table summary="Belgian iPhone applications" class="data"> <tr> <td>7am by milkcarton</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id327103042" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/apps/7am" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Alien Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300893249" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Armenian Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300759949" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Bali Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300503949" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Base-5 Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300750887" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Be Tv by Emmer Inc.</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id309927993" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://www.emmerinc.be/" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Belgium Zip by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300806453" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Binary Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id286014218" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Birthday Reminder (Lite) by Netwalk</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id312570207" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://iphone.netwalk.be/content/birthday-reminder" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Borg Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300459385" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Braille Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300256955" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Cuneiform Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300770434" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Elvish Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300417946" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Finger Twister by Netwalk</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id308579766" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://iphone.netwalk.be/content/finger-twister" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ge'ez Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300755432" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Greek Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300718369" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Hebrew Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300225940" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Hex Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300748897" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Hieroglyph Clockp by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300793664" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Hylian Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300872276" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>iPuke by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id301632107" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Keypoint by Bert Timmermans</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id332198720" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://www.keypointapp.com/" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Khmer Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300598203" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Klingon Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id298674751" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Laundry Day by websIT</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id327464056" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://www.crowdsurferapp.com/" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Lekker in de Buurt by Steven Teerlinck</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id349457603" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://www.lekkerindebuurt.be/" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Mayan Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300743786" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Movies by Netwalk</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id306404129" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://iphone.netwalk.be/category/tags/movies" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>myBooks by Netwalk</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id310153637" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://iphone.netwalk.be/content/mybooks" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>myGames by Netwalk</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id313043261" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://iphone.netwalk.be/content/mygames" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>N'Ko Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300865027" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Next Door Girls by Netwalk</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id321951989" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://iphone.netwalk.be/content/next-door-girls" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Octal Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300749507" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Oak by 10to1</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id299377607" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://www.10to1.be" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Radio.be by Nicolas Braem</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id302126985" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://www.project280.com/iphone-radio/" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Roman Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300676329" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Romulan Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300295303" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Sinhala Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300459385" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Snabiz by Netwalk</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id295218938" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://iphone.netwalk.be/content/snabiz" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Hotspot locator by Telenet</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id335553990" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://www.telenethotspots.be/nl/home.html" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Tamil Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300552568" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Thai Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300286294" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Tibetan Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300757339" class="ext">iTunes</a> </tr> <tr> <td>Touring Mobilis by Roving Bird</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id311113383" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://www.rovingbird.be/touringmobilis-nl/" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Trein België by Wasabi Apps</td> <td>No longer available <a href="http://www.wasabi-apps.com/trein-belgie/" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Twunch by milkcarton</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id349097699" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/apps/twunch/" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Urnfield Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id300753411" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Unix Clock by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id299942781" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Vandaag.be by Telenet</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id350348914" class="ext">iTunes</a> <a href="http://www.vandaag.be/" class="ext">Product page</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>VAT validator by Peter Elst</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id301205413" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td>VRadio by Werner Ramaekers</td> <td><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/id303665396" class="ext">iTunes</a></td> </tr> </table>

2009-09-04T18:01:42+02:00

belgian-iphone-apps Belgian iPhone apps

2010-02-05T22:00:23+01:00

Simon Schoeters 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 <a href="http://milkcarton.be/apps/lazypoken" title="A poken automounter" class="ext">LazyPoken</a> 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. <h3>Build settings</h3> 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? <h3>64-bit gotchas</h3> <ul> <li>Sparkle: make sure to include the With Garbage Collection version of Sparkle, you just activated garbage collection remember?</li> <li>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 <a href="http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Cocoa64BitGuide/ConvertingExistingApp/ConvertingExistingApp.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004247-CH5-SW1" title="64-bit Trasition Guide for Cocoa" class="ext">Converting an Existing Application to 64-Bit</a> documentation.</li> </ul> Still running into problems? Read the <a href="http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/PreferencePanes/Articles/UpdatingPreferencePanesforSnowLeopardandBeyond.html" title="Updating Preference Panes for Snow Leopard and Beyond" class="ext">Updating Preference Panes for Snow Leopard and Beyond</a> article from Apple's Preference Pane Programming Guide.

2010-02-04T00:06:36+01:00

building-64bit-prefpane Building a 64-bit prefpane

2010-02-04T00:15:10+01:00