Sam’s random musings

PagePacker Open-Sourced: “

I am celebrating the arrival of Mac OS X 10.5 by making the source code to PagePacker available. Here is the compiled application.

Don’t know what PagePacker is? Check this posting.

This is cool app to use to make paper GTD and calendars and stuff, but the nice thing is the source is a great little learning tool for Cocoa

(Via Big Nerd Ranch Weblog.)

lAsk 37signals: What is the best way to get customers who signup to actually use a product?:

This reminds me of the old “hosting a party” metaphor for web apps. Just because you’ve invited someone over to your house/app, doesn’t mean your hosting duties are over. You still need to welcome your guests, show them around, offer some introductions, and make sure they get into the flow.

That’s why the blank slate, the first screen people see, is so key. If it’s unwelcoming, people may not stick around.

This is a big deal for services/sites that have self sign, or have anykind of unguided experience. It is said that a ui should be self teaching, but have you ever seen one. The on the web we are so free to make unique user experiences that are not tied to interface guidelines or even native control widgets. In this is a great danger there are advantages to things like the Apple Human Interface Guidelines as limiting and restrictive as they may seem. To be able to leverage the vast experiences that your user has had (remember that a user is a human not a thing) has immense value. It speaks to using native widgets (or at least try to give the same sense of purpose as the native widget)

But let it be said that what you do for your user on their first experience in your app will reap great rewards (I mean $$) if you leave your user hanging they will not ‘hang’ out and find all your cool stuff. Assume that your mental model of how the app will be experienced is wrong, show them they way.

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)

Sample Code: MassiveImage:

Shows how to use a CGDataProvider to save a very large image with Image IO

Some sample code to have a good look at, since I seem to be dealing with ever LARGER images every day….

(Via Apple Developer Connection Headlines.)

Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide:

It’s so regular you could set your watch by it. The decay of a community is just as predictable as the decay of certain stable nuclear isotopes. As soon as an open source project, language, or what-have-you achieves a certain notoriety%u2014its half-life, if you will%u2014they swarm in, seemingly draining the very life out of the community itself. They are the Help Vampires. And I’m here to stop them.

SO RIGHT ON IT HURTS

Living the Life — Dave Batton:

There are a lot of ways you can create a preferences window for your Cocoa application. Of course you can just start with an empty window and start coding a toolbar. Or, if you don%u2019t want to start from scratch, you can use Matt Gemmell%u2019s SS_PrefsController class. Or you can grab some code from John Devor%u2019s Simple Preferences example project and modify it for your needs.

This is a great way to get a nice pref panel up and running fast

(Via .)

Preserve Metadata when resizing JPEG images:

One thing that Sandvox does is to make resized copies of image files. There are often a lot of useful metadata in a JPEG file, so I decided that it would be a good idea to preserve these as much as possible if scaling down a JPEG file to another size. Many but not all of these are supported by NSImage, so it’s not hard to extract from the original image and put in the other.

Good things to keep track of for later

(Via Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog.)

A handy trick for finding NSUserDefaults keys:

Slick, but too geeking for some

(Via Del.icio.us Tag: cocoa.)

Taming Mac OS X File Systems:

Posted by Amit Singh, Mac Engineering Manager

Google is a fantastic company to work for. I could cite numerous reasons why. Take the concept of “20 percent time.” Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time pursuing projects they’re passionate about. I started one such exciting project some time back, and I’m pleased to announce that Google is releasing the fruits of this project as an open source contribution to the Macintosh community. That project is MacFUSE, a Mac OS X version of the popular FUSE (File System in User Space) mechanism, which was created for Linux and subsequently ported to FreeBSD.

This is so very cool, I wish I had the time to play with this (and knew enough to make it worth it…….

(Via Official Google Mac Blog.)