Sam’s random musings

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.)

Interface Builder Tip:

It’s easy to beat up on Interface Builder, which until 10.5 ships, still feels a little crufty. It’s lagged behind Xcode in the major overhaul department. But sometimes I discover features that suprise me, like this tidbit from Apple’s Technical Q&A:

Q&A 1323: Interface element identification in Interface Builder

(Link compliments of Justin Anderson)

What the Q&A describes is a way to quickly identify the UI corresponding with any UI instance in IB’s hierarchical instance view. Just hold down control-shift and click an item:

Scott Stevenson’s recent bindings visualization discoveries, there seem to be a heap of features that I simply haven’t noticed. I guess I better keep my mouth shut before lambasting it too hard… nah!

Can’t wait for the next iteration of xCode as well, bring it on and call me an early (as possible) adopter

(Via Red Sweater Blog.)

DMG creation tips and tricks:

About DMG
For those who are reading this who are not aware of it, DMG (Disk Image) is the format commonly used to distribute software on OS X. There are other formats, the more traditional like tar.gz/zip/.sit.

This is a long and very detailed post about how to set up automatic builds with really nice looking DMGs ready for upload to your server.

(Via Nobody learns if nothing is brok3n.)

Nesting of folders has exceeded the recommended limit of 100:

If Disk Utility reports Nesting of folders has exceeded the recommended limit of 100, you can find the offending folders by opening a Terminal window and typing
sudo find / -maxdepth 100 -mindepth 100
The last few times I had people report this error to me, they turned out to have an old version of Vapor on their machine.”

Good to have this little snip in my pocket

(Via jpb’s Tech Notes.)

Taming Launchd:

Developers, and some power users who are reading this have probably heard of launchd. It’s Apple’s ‘mama process,’ responsible for launching other processes at startup, login, at regular intervals, or on demand. If you open the Activity Monitor application, and view ‘All Processes, Hierarchically,’ you’ll see that there are only two top-level processes: kernel_task, and launchd. The kernel sits there and does its thing, while launchd spawns all the other processes that make up your Macintosh computing experience.

Some good insight into this relative newcomer to Mac OS X as a way or launching and running services of various kinds in the background, some good notes on the things that don’t work quite as expected (bugs) and some ways it is used now. Also some links to two of the editors for launchd files.

(Via Red Sweater Blog.)

Good simple instructions to have your Help Book rebuilt when you do a build

TextMate for Projects with Both HTML and Code:

I don’t know how many find themselves in the the situation of working on a single project that involves HTML, CSS and Objective-C, but I do. I feel it’s worth pointing out how TextMate is invaluable for this sort of thing…

nice little summary of the kick’n text editor

(Via Theobroma Cacao.)

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p>Blog @ Oofn.net » Miscellaneous Projects:

CTGradient, badges, and more

posted by tburns

These are some really really nice visual add ons for cocoa apps, when I finally get the time to do some cosmetic tunes to all the stuff I have been doing recently I am going to have to take another look at this

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