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  • Stakeout info

    mike 9:42 pm on September 16, 2009 | 0 Permalink
    Tags: kqueue, stakeout, testing

    This post is here to prevent broken links, since I’ve noticed people coming here from a link to my old Stakeout page.

    Stakeout was a program that runs something when files change, by watching for file changes at the system level using kqueue. It was intended to support running automated tests. The 2nd version even worked with growl to pop up info about the test success or failure.

    I still have the Stakeout-2 tarball available, but I haven’t tested it in years.

    Why? I’ve been working on things that take too long to test, so I don’t want to run a suite every time a file changes anymore. I still think it’s a useful idea.

     

  • mike 1:05 pm on September 15, 2009 | 0 Permalink
    Tags: i-search, incremental-search, , plugin

    An update on the incremental-search plugin for NSTextViews that continues to be a big draw to this site – I don’t currently use it on 10.5, since it’s an input manager plugin, but I do miss it.

    The most recent source that I know of is on leverage.sf.net which is a repository for text-system hacks I used to work on. If anyone wants to pick it up and modernize it, I’d be grateful.

    In particular, you want the ‘isim’ directory. The other directories are unrelated, but if you find them interesting, I’d love to hear from you.

    If you just want to download the last working universal binary build (from 2007), it is here: IncrementalSearchInputManager-universal.zip. Let me know how it works?

     

  • Tinkering

    mike 12:04 pm on September 7, 2009 | 1 Permalink
    Tags: computing, , scripting,

    I really liked a recent post by Alex Payne titled Switching Season. He says he gets an itch every year or so to go try something different, and I can sympathize. What he says at the end really resonates:

    It’s about computer usage as a creative act, something that becomes harder and harder to experience the more proficient one gets with a computer.

    I feel this way every once in a while too – It used to be fun just getting a computer to do something. Once you know enough about how it works and most of what you do is handled pretty smoothly, some of the fun goes out of it. The problem with high-quality free apps like Mail and Address Book is that they remove the motivation for people to tinker with new ways of using computers for the same old things.

    This urge to tinker is pretty strong, at least for me, and I think it might be one reason why I’m not so excited about web and mobile (at least iPhone) programming. Both platforms have a lot going for them, but the barrier to tinkering with my data is high – sometimes I can’t get my data out of a service, and if I want to write scripts to combine two web apps, where do they run?

    For example, I’ve seen a lot of great things come from the community built around BibDesk’s scripting interface, and if it were a web app, none of that would have happened.

     

    • Nicholas Riley 7:51 pm on September 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      This is kind of the point of services like Google App Engine. Unfortunately they still make you worry about scale before you really need to.

      And yeah, it’s really hard to resist the tinkering urge. I spent an hour last week trying to hack up an application interface to Quick Look to let me go full-screen. (The documented APIs aren’t very flexible and the undocumented ones are overcomplicated. It didn’t go very far.)

  • mike 4:59 pm on September 5, 2009 | 0 Permalink
    Tags: hack, lost-time, wordpress

    Just wasted a lot of time doing a clean reinstall of WordPress to avoid lingering malicious code from the recent worm that’s been infecting WP installations – I noticed a new user on my blog that I didn’t recognize, and so it looks like I’d been hit.

    I thought a couple of times that I’d like to just replace the installation with a static site and move this blog over to something hosted, but it wasn’t easy enough that I decided to stick with status quo. I did clean things up and get rid of an old drupal installation that couldn’t have been secure in years. The redirection WP plugin was a big help in managing this.

     

  • mike 2:15 pm on August 20, 2009 | 0 Permalink
    Tags: location, , network, script

    Prompted by a thread on the ever-useful Sun internal mac-users alias, here’s a daemon that runs a script every time your network location changes:

    Mac OS X LocationChanger – TECH.inhelsinki.nl.

     

  • mike 11:54 am on August 18, 2009 | 0 Permalink
    Tags: , freeware, , mailsmith

    From @spamsieve, I heard that BareBones’ Mailsmith has a new home: mailsmith.org. It’s freeware and will be under development.

    It’s great to see new life for one of the few alternative desktop mail clients for OS X, and while there’s no info on their plans for it yet, there’s some great discussion of possible features on the google group mailsmith-talk.

    I’ll be curious to see if any of the design choices will be changing – for example, no IMAP support and no inline HTML display… I have to use IMAP, and despite common abuse, I do think HTML email is useful.

    edit: Looks like no Mailsmith IMAP: “Not any time soon…” – @siegel on twitter

     

  • Notifications and Distraction in Webapps

    mike 9:29 am on August 11, 2009 | 0 Permalink
    Tags: , focus, growl, notification, xmpp

    Found via Hacker News:

    abi | blog » Introducing Silent Diving Seagulls: An XMPP Interface for Desktop Notifications

    The idea here is that you can use XMPP to let web apps pop up Growl (or libnotify or Snarl, etc) notifications on your desktop. This is a pretty cool hack, and it seems like the right solution to getting notifications from the cloud onto your desktop – as Abi mentions in the post, you don’t want direct connections to Growl and you also don’t want every site writing its own notify app. It’s also another step in blurring the lines between web apps and desktop apps.

    However, I think the majority of uses for this kind of notification are distracting and unproductive. The example Abi uses is getting updates from friendfeed – you’d get a notification every time one of your friends does anything on friendfeed. If you think hearing a beep every time you get new mail is distracting, just wait.

    About the only use I’ve found for notifications is to let you know you can get back to work when something long you’ve been waiting for finishes. I wrote more about this in ‘go juggle’: an attention callback.

    So notification technology is useful, and it’s cool to see web apps getting into it, but please, web or desktop – ship with notifications off. Let’s not have the default behavior of your app be distraction.

    edit: In the HN thread on Silent Diving Seagulls, abi notes that he’s sensitive to the distraction this can cause, and makes some good points about why it’s still a good idea. The best point – if everyone adopts something like this, email goes back to being email and not an overloaded notification scheme.

     

  • mike 7:43 am on August 10, 2009 | 0 Permalink

    lolstartups, While at the GTUG Campout in Mountain View, Jacob….

    This shows an example of an app built on top of google wave that has nothing to do with email and is really impressive and useful.

    If I had to guess, wave will be a successful platform for lots of applications that don’t look much like email at all. And we’ll still have email as it exists today.

     

  • mike 11:37 pm on August 6, 2009 | 2 Permalink
    Tags: apple, ,

    From the HN thread on this post from Garry at posterous, about product minimalism:

    Teams at apple are TINY. Mail is like 3 guys. …

    Two things: The thread was about how high quality software is easier without politics you get in large teams, which I agree with, and I bet that a lot of the software we love was made by smaller teams than you’d think.

    And, just 3 engineers on Mail explains a lot.

     

    • evan 1:55 am on August 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      luckily that number is nowhere close to true :)

    • mike 8:14 am on August 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Evan – I thought 3 sounded low. Care to elaborate? Maybe Garry was only counting one group? Leaving out framework developers and testers?

  • Visible bindings

    mike 11:11 am on August 3, 2009 | 2 Permalink

    Just noticed this: Two-Way Data Binding in Flex 4.

    Flex is an SDK for building Flash apps that I know nothing about, but this article presents what looks like a rough equivalent of Cocoa Bindings, and it has one really nice property that Cocoa has always been missing – say what you want about specifying a UI with XML, but the Flex XML looked like it’d be relatively easy to scan, search and diff. I’ve always thought that a human-readable text format for Cocoa NIBs would be a big improvement.

     

    • ssp 4:39 am on August 4, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Isn’t the xib format readable enough?

    • mike 6:58 am on August 4, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Not really – I’m not comfortable merging two xibs by hand, for instance. It’s kind of understandable, but I guess what I really want is a source format that I can read and edit in text as well as in IB.

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