I’ve been doing quite a bit of development recently using Ruby on Rails under Mac OS X. Unfortunately it can be a little tricky to get rails apps deployed nicely under Apache. The machine I’m using is an aging G4 with very little RAM so running rails apps in CGI mode is very slow! Initially …
Author Archives: daniel
The joys of coding with a child on your lap
Well, for one you can only do it one handed! Also you have to be ready for sudden lunges towards the keyboard. Bang bang bang go the keys. Oops a wrong click or an inopportune Enter and say goodbye to all that work. Still it is nice for the little one to see what Daddy does all …
Continue reading “The joys of coding with a child on your lap”
Cocoa bindings
I have to say that Cocoa bindings are one of the coolest things to some to Cocoa in a long time. It takes a bit of getting used to however, and the documentation isn’t the greatest. One of the things that had me stumped for a bit was how to have a button‘s enabled flag depend …
The cocoa rendering system is really nice
For a secret project I’m currently working on I needed to make a NSTextView that resized its contents so that it was always fully visible regardless of how many lines of text were in there. Coding something like that under Windows would have been pretty awful (especially since the text needs to still be editable), …
Continue reading “The cocoa rendering system is really nice”
Blog APIs
It can be quite annoying when an application claims to support an API and actually doesn’t 🙁 I’ve been working on BlogThing off an on for about a week or so. Originally I used a bit of the metaWeblog API and a bit of the MovableType API. I’ve since standardized on metaWeblog and removed the references …
Accessing the string and attribute data in a NSTextView
NSTextView stores its data in a NSTextStorage object. NSTextStorage descends from NSMutableAttributed string, so that gives us a clue. The easiest thing to do is to make a category on the NSAttributedString class to do whatever it is you want containing something like the following.      NSRange range;     int i;     int L = [self length];                  i = 0;     while(i<L) …
Continue reading “Accessing the string and attribute data in a NSTextView”
I’ve just added automatic image resizing to my blog client
It’s all very exciting 🙂 Here is an example of an auto-resized images I’ve also added code to automatically recognize URLs in the text and convert them to links. For example http://www.automagic-software.com/
Colourized entries
I went to all the trouble of adding code to allow for different fonts and colours and such. I tested it on my local machine against WordPress 1.5x and it all worked perfectly. Then I tried to make a post here where I’m running WordPress 2.0 and found that it stripped out all the lovely …
First Post
This is my first post to my new blog. I’ve been working on a simple blog client for my wife to use to post pictures of our daughter Molly to a private blog. Last time I’d checked there weren’t any nice blog clients that supported password protected blogs in a nice way. So I whipped …