Michael Bianco

NSSound+SoundList

It confounds me as to why Apple will provide an easy way to get a reference a standard system sound (via -soundNamed:) but doesn’t provide any easy way to get a list of available system sounds. Well, as you might of guessed, I’ve created a NSSound category that adds this functionality. The code is adapted from this cocoa-dev post. You can download the source files (BSD license) here. On a side note I’ve updated the source code page. The underlying code is now alot cleaner (and renders correctly on IE!) and it uses some of those fancy AJAX transitions.

ManOpen Universal Binary

ManOpen is an awesome man page viewer that i use quite alot. Unfortunatly the author didn’t have a UB version of it availible. Since I have a MacBook Pro with a little bit of work I was able to convert the project over to using native XCode targets and compile a UB of ManOpen. I emailed the author about it a couple weeks ago and he hasn’t posted anything on the products site so I figured I’d throw the UB application & source code on my site for other people to download until he gets a chance to update his site. Note: I didn’t change any of the source code, just the project structure. ManOpen UB Application ManOpen UB Source

Color Blender 1.2

I’ve finally gotten around to getting Color Blender 1.2 out the door. There’s not alot of changes (hardly any at all), most of the changes are to the codebase and project structure. Changed rgb copy string to be “r,g,b” Compiled & tested as UB Some code cleanup Enjoy!

MacBook Pro

I’m the proud owner a brand new MacBook Pro (base 15″ model). What makes me even more happy is the fact that I got it for under $100. How? It was one of those ‘fill out all these stupid online offers and get a free computer’ – I really didn’t think it would work, but it did…

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.

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.

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.

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!..

Gear Icon & Add Menu Icon

The last set (at least for now) of my common icons for Cocoa development are the gear/action menu icon, and the add menu icon. You can download the tiff images and Pixen source files here. Feel free to use these icons in any of your projects. These are all the icons I have to release to the community right now. I have a some custom UI classes that I’ll be releasing soon that you can use these icons in.

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…

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