Tewha » Mac OS X

Flash video gets dramatically more efficient

Steven Fisher — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 23:43:41 +0000

I’m especially glad the vast conspiracy keeping Flash down by falsely claiming video decoding was horribly inefficient didn’t prevent Adobe from fixing that inefficiency. Haters gonna hate, yo. You gotta rise above.

John Nack on Adobe : Flash video gets dramatically more efficient, via Daring Fireball.

Xcode tip: Renaming files shared by projects

Steven Fisher — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 00:24:45 +0000

What if you want to rename a file that’s used in multiple Xcode projects? Well, previously I’d rename the file in one project, then open each project in series and correct broken references. But I discovered today that this is unnecessary. If you open all of your projects first, Xcode will fix the references across all of your open projects as you rename files in any of the projects.

For all I know, this has always been a feature of Xcode. But I’ve never noticed it before. So for this stunning display of common sense: Well done, Apple!

Ars Technica on Snow Leopard

Steven Fisher — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:36:05 +0000

John Siracusa: Ars Technica review of Snow Leopard. Includes a discussion of some of the file system’s new tricks and QuickTime X’s secrets, which you’ll probably never need to know. But don’t you want to know?

Password Changes in Open Directory

Steven Fisher — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:35:15 +0000

John C. Welch (aka Bynkii, Angry Mac Bastard): Password Changes in Open Directory (One burst of profanity). For us Mac users who are sometimes a little too smug about the Mac’s user interface. (The podcast: Angry Mac Bastards. Extreme profanity there, though.)

Rules to avoid retain cycles

Steven Fisher — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:16:56 +0000

Matt Gallagher: Rules to avoid retain cycles

Apple’s developer documentation website is horrible

Steven Fisher — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:10:02 +0000

Isn’t anyone at Apple even mildly embarrassed about how poor the ADC search results are?

Like everyone other Mac developer (at least, those not using a seed… no comment otherwise), I’ve been bit by the Mac OS X 10.5.7 bug that causes Xcode to crash almost every time the documentation viewer is used.

Now I’m a reasonable guy. I get that a Mac OS X update has to be thoroughly tested. I wouldn’t want it otherwise. So let me get this off my chest right away: it isn’t the bug itself that bothers me.

Xcode 3.1.3 shipped after Mac OS X 10.5.7. So it should have been pretty easy to add code to Xcode see if the developer has executed a defaults write com.apple.xcode dontevershowthefuckingdocviewer 1 and then never show the documentation viewer, so I wouldn’t lose unsaved work every time I forgot and tried to open it. ((Maybe use a different identifier for it.))

And in the future, the documentation links should be handled via an URL type that can be handled by another application.

And, oh yeah:

Why is the documentation viewer embedded in the IDE?

Splitting the documentation viewer into a separate application would make a lot of sense. Browsers crash! If it wasn’t this, it would be something else that crashed the documentation viewer. This was predictable. This was, dare I say, expected.

But what really, really makes me angry is the developer site. The content is generally pretty good, but the search engine is horrible:

Fix your summary so it’s actually useful. Apple’s summary: Google’s summary: There’s just no comparison. ((Google, you rock.))
I don’t need to see every single empty redirect. Showing the same effective document multiple times is just random clutter.
There are better ways to represent the format of documentation in search results than just including it in the URL.
Add up those last two items, and you realize: I don’t need PDFs in the search results. PDF should just be linked to from the documentation itself.

I’ll update this when I have more points. The bile has receded enough for me to code again.

Developer Color Picker

Steven Fisher — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 05:03:07 +0000

Wade Cosgrove (Panic): Developer Color Picker. Copy colors from the picker as a [UIColor initWithRed:green:blue:alpha:] sequence.

Debugging drawing performance

Steven Fisher — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:55:12 +0000

I knew about Quartz Debug.app , but hadn’t heard of NSShowAllDrawing. Sounds more practical.

Keeping optimal autorelease pools

Steven Fisher — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:40:05 +0000

Martin Pilkington on autorelease pools:

However, a problem arises when you’re creating a lot of objects at once. The obvious solution is to initialise and release objects by hand in this case, but sometimes it isn’t possible. A lot of objects returned by Cocoa methods are autoreleased (by convention any object returned by a class method (other than +new or +alloc) should be autoreleased).

This is a good practical example of autorelease pool manipulation, including numbers showing before and after.

iPhoto Faces fail

Steven Fisher — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:38:58 +0000