http://www.theronge.com Cocoa, Mac OS X and maybe a few other things. Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:56:10 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Lately I've been doing file system work in cocoa and I was using NSFileManager, but that quickly got out of hand as NSFileManager is lacking in regards to symbolic links. So, I factored out the often used code and created a class which uses FSRefs internally. However, I've since ... http://www.theronge.com/2005/07/13/symbolic-trouble/ For while now, I've been dissatisfied with Mac OS X backup apps. There are too many apps that claim to backup, when all they do is sync. In my book synching and backing up are two different things, yet the market is filled with shareware apps that synch. The apps ... http://www.theronge.com/2005/07/15/its-too-bad/ There is a cool article at MacDevCenter on writing Spotlight plugins. While it's great that 3rd party developers are writing spotlight plugins, I do have a few qualms with some recently released plugins. For example, the OmniGraffle spotlight plugin includes an attribute called Number of Shapes. How is this ever ... http://www.theronge.com/2005/07/15/writing-spotlight-plugins/ What a steal deal, $7 for a whole year of hosting over at Dreamhost. When it took my old host, Hostcentric, over a week to rebuild and restore the server that my website was on I decided it was time to switch. Based off of a friends recommendation, I signed ... http://www.theronge.com/2005/07/21/dreamhost-2/ On the local machine run this (when it asks for a passphrase just hit return): ssh-keygen -t rsa Copy the newly created file from the local machine to the remote machine and append the key to the correct file: scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remotemachine:~/.ssh/new_key ssh remotemachine cat ~/.ssh/new_key >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys rm ~/.ssh/new_key http://www.theronge.com/2005/07/25/ssh-without-a-password/ Right now I am running: SafariXcodeTerminalThunderbirdAdiumNetNewsWireiTunesOmniGraffleectoTextmateInterfaceBuilderQuicksilverWhat apps are you running? http://www.theronge.com/2005/07/25/what-apps-am-i-running/ Entourage 2004 is stuck in the pre-OS X interface days. Although the application has received some overhauls, it still feels clunky. On OS 9, Entourage was best of the breed. I lived and died by Entourage, no other app could hold a candle to it, but Entourage has not matured ... http://www.theronge.com/2005/08/18/widescreen-interface-and-e-mail-apps/ I'm a member of a number of online mailing lists, which I have an e-mail address specifically for. I've connected to my e-mail mailing list account through POP3 and I then sort them using a e-mail client rules. However, i've gotten tired of waiting for hundreds of messages to downloaded ... http://www.theronge.com/2005/10/20/pop3-to-imap/ NetNewsWire Pro rocks my socks, so when I went looking for a desktop tool to tie into WordPress I figured MarsEdit would be it. While, MarsEdit is a cool app, it just doesn't feel as complete and polished as NetNewsWire. What I was really looking for was a tool to ... http://www.theronge.com/2005/10/20/ecto-wordpress-dreamhost/ I found this in the ACM office here at the University of Illinois. Picture thanks to Nicholas Riley. http://www.theronge.com/2005/10/29/command-c-on-scissors/ Due to my dissatisfaction with existing mail clients, I've been slowly grinding out a simple IMAP client. There was no way I was going to write my own IMAP client, so I scoured the web and came across a few libraries. So I wanted something that was clean, fast and ... http://www.theronge.com/2005/11/13/imap-libraries/ I discovered the incredibly useful unix program screen just recently. It allows multiple terminal sessions running at once and it provides easy access for switching between sessions. To run the command type: screen Once screen is running you can do Control-AC to create a new window and use Control-A followed by a ... http://www.theronge.com/2005/11/13/screen/ Here's a cool trick that converts man pages to postscript and opens the file in Preview. Add this to your .tcshrc file in your home directory: alias preman 'man -t \!^ > /tmp/\!^.ps; open /tmp/\!^.ps' Then to open man pages in Preview type: preman NAMEHERE http://www.theronge.com/2005/11/15/use-preview-to-view-man-pages/ I've been doing some hardcore hacking on my pet project, an e-mail client named Kiwi, and what you see above are it's first breaths of life. It's not much to look at, but it's significant progress. I am finally able to load the inbox and display messages when they are ... http://www.theronge.com/2005/11/20/in-the-beginning/ I've been using the wicked cool Textmate to do programming for the last week. It's one of those apps that after every launch you find a new little feature that draws you in even more. Each little feature makes you more productive and your workflow more streamline. Earlier this week ... http://www.theronge.com/2005/11/21/todo-command-in-textmate/