Skip to content

Year: 2006

Add To Login/Startup Items Functionality

Such a simple piece of functionality, you would assume it would be trivial to implement. As you might have guessed – it’s not. There has been a few hack-ishy ways outlined here but none are complete and easy to integrate into your app. I’ve created MABLoginItems, an easy way to add the ‘add to startup items’ functionality into your application. With one line of code you can add your application to the users login items (you can also remove from login items, and check if the application already exists in the login items). MABLoginItems is released under a BSD license, you can download it here.

Continue Reading

DKActionButton: Cocoa Action Buttons Made Easy

Bringing use to my cocoa icons is DKActionButton, an easy to use class that allows you to create ‘action buttons’ as found in many cocoa apps today. DKActionButton is used in App Stop, along with another unreleased application (hence the DK prefix). Heres what it looks like in action: DKActionButton is pretty easy to use and simply takes a couple minutes worth of work in interface builder and a couple lines of code. You can download DKActionButton along with a sample application here. DKActionButton licensed under the BSD, so you can use it in commercial/shareware apps.

Continue Reading

Almost There: App Stop V2.0

After many months of development I’m happy to announce that App Stop V2.0 is almost done and will be released, by the latest, in two weeks. The main changes in App Stop V2 are under the hood. Almost the entire code base has been rewritten. This fixes the two major issues with App Stop 1.1: performance, and Intel incompatibility. App Stop is 2-5x faster and now runs on Intel based Macs. Of course App Stop V2 will also come with a slew of enhancements, UI tweaks, and bug fixes; but the main focus for this release was performance and Intel compatibility. Keep checking the blog for updates, but in the meantime here is the new ‘table view’ (now called the Application Manager) in App Stop V2.

Continue Reading

How Much Is Too Much

I like os x because its UI is pretty & functional at the same time. OS X does have it’s fancy visual effects, but in most cases the effects are done well enough that they don’t get in the way of your work. Expose is a great example of this. The zoom effect always take the same amount of time no-matter how many windows you have open, and its done quick enough that it doesn’t get in the way. Sheets are an example of when Apple (in my opinion) slowed things down for the sake of coolness. Don’t get me wrong, I love sheets, I think they are an awesome UI element. Apple just made the default fold out speed way too slow!..

Continue Reading

Apple’s Javascript Debugger: Drosera

I was doing a little web-work, and came across a bug in my javascript code. I spent a couple minutes trying to find it using the javascript console in Safari, but quickly gave up and decided to give Apple’s Javascript debugger (Drosera) a try. I tried it a couple months ago but couldn’t get it to work, but I decided to download the latest nightly build and see if it had improved. It did. Drosera attached to the webkit browser fine, and inspected any page that I looked at in the webkit browser…

Continue Reading

Back From C4

Well, yesterday I came from C4. C4 was the first developers conference I have attended, and it was well worth going. I met lots of cool people: some who already have some apps out, some who havent released anything – yet. The Funny There is, at least for me, two pretty funny & memorable moments of C4. Before Brian W. Fitzpatrick gave his talk on the future of subversion he said “All information in this talk is under the NDA.” I immediately got really excited, I’ve never heard NDA information before, and this was about subversion, software I actually use! He follows that up with “Yeah, it is ‘Not Decided Apon’.” That gave me a good laugh 🙂 Aaron Hillegass was the guest speaker at C4…

Continue Reading

Adding Methods to Core Flash Classes

Every once in a while I get an email that looks like this: I tried using your Object, Function, and String method additions. When I tried to compile I get a bunch of error messages! What do I do?! Yup, this is because the method definitions are not in the Class definition files that flash looks at when compiling. The core class definitions that Flash looks at are located here: [code]~/Library/Application Support/Macromedia/Flash MX 2004/en/Configuration/Classes[/code] That “Classes” folder will contain all the method definitions for all core Flash classes (MovieClip, Object, Button, Color, etc). To make my method additions compile correctly you’ll have to edit the corresponding Class definition files and add the method definitions in…

Continue Reading

Green Check & Red Cross Circular Icons

One of the most annoying things about software development on os x is duplicating the look and feel of those cool ui widgets that Apple wont let us use. You know, those icons and widgets you spend hours on trying to get them to work like the “real thing”. For an application I’ve been working on I wanted a little green check icon (ala software update) and a red cross icon. Took me a little photoshopping but I think I got two small icons that look pretty good. You can download a zip with the tif & psd images here. Feel free to use the icons in any of your projects.

Continue Reading