Michael Bianco

OS X Hex Value Color-Picker Plug-In

Recently I was throwing around an idea about making a plug-in for the standard color-picker panel for OS X. All I really wanted it to do was give me the hex value of the selected color. I did a fair amount of research and eventually found that someone had already done it. I’ve never seen that advertised, or shown anywhere; but so far I’ve found the plug-in proves useful. Now if only the author would make the source available so a good example of how to make a color-picker plug-in would be available…

Expr Crippled on OS X

Lately, I’ve been trying to dig into shell scripting. While reading through a Bash Scripting Guide and testing out the expr command line utility I found that the OS X version of expr is very limited compared to the linux/standard version. All of the nice string related commands outlined on the Man Page for expr don’t work on the OS X version of the utility. This is severly limiting especially because (as far as I know) there is no way to find the index of a substring in Bash scripting except through expr. In any case, I’ve filed a bug-report (rdar://4269034) about this problem. On a side-note, thank-you everyone who responded to my previous post on ‘What is Missing?’. I will be making one of the suggested projects.

What Is Missing?

What piece of software is missing from the Mac platform? What plug-in or addition to OS X would severely increase your productivity by eliminating a step in your workflow? I’m going to start working on my next application, but wanted your opinion of what I should make. If you have any ideas or comments, send me an E-mail or post a comment on this blog post. Feel free to share this with anyone who is interested.

Interactive Software Development

10 years ago software was developed by people in small cubicals coding all day. Ok, maybe thats a little bit of an exaggeration, but for the most part software companies pumped out a new product every year that had new features that the users of their software just had to have. The software companies didn’t really have that much interaction with their client. Software development today is rapidly changing today. Software is built to accomadate what the user really needs not what the developer thinks the user needs. Software companies like Macromedia ask their user base what features they want in the software, what they think the software needs…

App Stop 1.0!

I’m very happy to announce the release of App Stop 1.0! This release encompasses months worth of work and hopefully makes for a very solid 1.0 release for App Stop…

Free Linux Programming Book

While browsing the forums over at Cprogramming.com, somebody posted a link to a full PDF download of Advanced Linux Programming. I skimmed through the chapters and it looks pretty good, since I’ve never really read a book on linux/unix this should be very informative.

Hurricane Katrina

A little late in reporting this, but life is busy… The devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina is enormous, its very saddening to see an American city looking like a third-world country. Even more saddening is level of crime that New Orleans is experiencing, the raping and stealing that is occurring is especially saddening. Instead of the citizens of New Orleans trying to be charitable to each other, help each other survive, and find a way out of the city; some citizens have given into evil-doing and are committing mass crimes preventing law officials from saving the various people all around the city….

PDFCombine 1.0

Last week I needed to combine a couple of PDF’s together. I thought ‘I’m in this advanced operating system it should be easy’. Well, it wasn’t, and the solutions out on macupdate.com and the like were either shareware (I wasn’t going to pay $20 for such a simple task such as this), or didn’t output the PDF correctly (for instance, you couldn’t search/select the text that previously was searchable/selectable). I was kind of annoyed that simple task like this could not be completed on such a modern operating system such as OS X; so I wrote my own program and thus PDFCombine 1.0 was born. PDFCombine uses the new PDFKit framework introduced in 10.4 to do all the hard work, so it was really very easy to write the program…

App Stop 1.0b Released!

I’ve just released App Stop 1.0b. The following fixes & changes have been made: Fixed a bug where applications that should be in the menu bar item’s menu, weren’t Upgraded AGProcess to .5, which fixed a few small bugs that were occurring Some small speed optimizations I rewrote the background-application update algoririth, ands its much faster using much less CPU when checking for background-applications Fixed a bug where your selection on the table view would change to the newly added application Totally rewrote the helper application which handled peforming actions on root and other applications not running on the current UID…

Back From Vacation!

I’m back from vacationing in New Hampshire. I stayed up in the mountains near a small lake, a place I go to every year. It was awesome; I went sailing, nee-bording, tubing, boating, swimming, diving off of rocks, hiking, biking, eating :D- it was an awesome time. The rural landscape is awesome, the air is so clean- I can’t wait to go back next year. On another note, I’m preparing to release V1.0b of App Stop, it should be released within the next week. I’m pretty amazed at the popularity of my easingScrollBar class, it has received almost 1200 downloads to date. I’ve also finally decided to buy Write Great Code: Understanding the Machine (Amazon had the best deal)…

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