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Year: 2005

Merry Christmas

Yes! Its that time of year again, Christmas time! I love Christmas, its got to be my favorite time of year. Lots of family, food, presents, fun and celebration of the birth of our Lord! What could be better? Our family has a tradition of getting together on Christmas eve and eating 7 types of different fish dishes. Its lot of fun, this year their will be about 27 people total at our family gathering. In any case, I wish you a very merry Christmas, and a happy new year!

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Interface Builder: Connection Trick

While working on the next version of XASH I came across a problem: I couldn’t seem to connect to a WebView which was a sub-view of a NSView which was a sub-view of a NSSplitView. The connector just wouldn’t select the WebView no-matter how I dragged my mouse over it. I did some research and came across a feature I never knew existed in interface builder, a hierarchical view of all the UI elements and object instances: The badly circled button on the right of the window allows you to access this view. This is really nice for easily setting up connections between controller objects and UI elements- you can easily select the UI elements no-matter how deep the UI elements are nested.

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New Xcode Actionscript Language Definition File

The new actionscript language definition files that I posted about earlier are available. You can get the Flash 7 or the Flash 8 version of the definition files. You can download the BASH script I wrote which generates the files here. To install simply drop the two files included in the download into /Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Specifications. Kudos to Sam Robbins for creating the original actionscript language definition file. The best thing about the new language definition files is placeholders for actionscript functions & methods like in Objective-C. Here’s a screenshot of the code-sense with placeholders in action: Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements! Enjoy!

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CSS Optimizer 1.0

I finally found some time to get CSS Optimizer 1.0 released to the public. The 1.0 release brings with it alot of changes: Adding support for the “”}”” hack outlined here: http://diveintoaccessibility.org/examples/fontsize.html Added processing css from the standard input (-i option) Added outputting processed css to the standard output (-o option) Added -q (quiet) option Code cleanup & optimization Updated manual/reame now in HTML Online version of CSS Optimizer at: http://developer.mabwebdesign.com/cssoptimizer/compress.html CSS un-compressor at: http://developer.mabwebdesign.com/cssoptimizer/uncompress.html Exit codes are now predictable…

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Cool Apache Trick

I recently came across this cool apache trick. You can change the value of a PHP configuration variable using a .htaccess file in your server. For instance if you wanted to change the include_path php configuration variable you could use the following .htaccess command: Every PHP file contained in the same directory, or child directories of the .htaccess command will have the include_path variable changed to the new value. Its strange that there isn’t much documentation available about the php_value derivative, no information is available on apache.org, and even google didn’t seem to turn up any ‘real’ documentation about the command.

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NaturalDocs

A few weeks ago I was searching around trying to decide what documentation system to use in my Actionscript/Flash projects. There are alot of options out there, but these are the ones that I found viable for my situation: as2api AS2Doc VisDoc NaturalDocs As2api: overall as2api seems like a good solution but I really didn’t like the style of the documentation as2api created and the os x binary didn’t seem to work on os x. AS2Doc: looks like a good package, but it costs money; I cant see paying for something that has a free alternative which has very similar functionality. I’d rather donate to an open-source project. VisDoc: looked really nice- exactly what I was looking for, I was very close to buying it until I saw NaturalDocs…

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Free iPod

I finally gave in and decided to try one of the those ‘Get a free iPod’ offers. I did some research before signing up, and it seems as though this offer is totally legit. To get the free iPod you have to complete 1 offer (some offers are free, some cost less than $5), and get five people to do the same using your referral link. From what I’ve read gratis (the free ipod company) gets ~$100 for each person who signs up for an offer. That means that when you complete the requirements for a free ipod they already have $600 in their pocket and an ipod costs ~$300. So, if your interested in getting a free ipod, and are feeling really kind, please sign up with my refferal link.

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XASH: Flash Help File Viewer

XASH, a Flash help file viewer written in Cocoa whose goal is to make it easier & faster to view flash help files is now available. At the moment the implementation is very simply and doesn’t provide any advantages over Flash IDE help viewer (other than its faster, open-source, and a native Cocoa application); but I’m planning on adding filtering and searching features which should make finding the right help pages alot easier. If you have any feature requests or bug reports please let me know!

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