penguin sounds

This is pretty cool. A way to set the opacity on your Textmate window.

I’m usually against this sort of transparency-everywhere mentality; it reminds me of the Enlightenment window manager for Linux.

But this works really nicely.

I thought this paper was pretty interesting, since AppleScript is my favorite language to hate. An interesting, but failed experiment. I entirely support its aims though. The problem of how to replace command line pipes in a GUI environment is still an interesting one.

I found this today and it’s too useful to not link to.

1. A bundle for editing zsh scripts
2. A terminal command for going to the directory the front textmate document resides in

Panic is looking for a bugtracker.

I’ve used Mantis to good effect. You can check out how Ardour uses it here.

You’ve read Refactoring. You’ve seen Prefactoring on the bookstore’s shelf. Well, after you’ve fact’d it all up, it’s time for Defactoring.

My new book, which introduces such techniques as overriding your framework’s core eventloop and running dynamic_cast<> on each widget that passes through to see if it’s the widget you’re looking for.

Red Sweater Blog - It Should Be Free

I don’t care if someone charges for an app or not. But one thing that has always puzzled me is why there are so many free (as in beer) applications for the mac that aren’t also open source. If you’re giving your application away for free, why not show the source too?

My only guess is that the default-to-open-source attitude isn’t as in-grained in the mac world as is it elsewhere.

Well, I was wrong. Apple seems to think that signing all apps is more important than anything resembling a sane test+deployment strategy.

That better be a good iPhone simulator.

John Gruber writes about the iLounge article about the rumors about the upcoming iPhone SDK release.He makes it sound as if the only way to get an application is from the iTunes Store which Apple will be the gatekeeper of.

Here is why he is wrong: developers will need a way to get an application onto the iPhone before it has been released for sale. There will have to be a way to get incomplete applications onto the iPhone before their release to the iTunes Store. I haven’t seen anything in the rumors that say a developer or user can’t simply drag the application into iTunes like any music file for loading into the iPhone.

Tiered SDKs? Sure. Apple’s approval required for selling apps in the iTunes Store? Sure. Not being able to write and test a deployment of an app to the iPhone before getting Apple’s approval? So impractical, I don’t see how it would be workable for any developer at all. And if a developer can deploy an app, I don’t see any reason a user couldn’t use the same mechanism.

Matt Ball writes about the tendency of “delicious generation” apps to become abandonware.

That’s fine by me. My biggest problem with them is that they seem to be composed almost entirely of lightweight to-do list applications and other such “my first real program” homework assignments.

http://www.anxietyapp.com/
http://hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper
http://www.culturedcode.com/things/
http://www.objectivesatisfaction.com/what_todo/
http://www.jimmcgowan.net/Site/DoIt.html
http://www.nomicro.com/Products/ToDo/
http://www.magnetismstudios.com/MonkeyBusinessLabs/Checkmarker
http://www.bluehenley.com/products/dobedo/
http://www.mygnu.com/julius/proj_todo.html
http://www.myownapp.com/istk_app.html
http://www.intuiware.com/Products/MacOSX/HotPlan/
http://www.myownapp.com/meinkopp_app.html
http://www.desertsandsoftware.com/?todo_home
http://www.orionbelt.com/productMac.php
http://a-sharp.com/opal/opal

Nice icons and websites though. Makes me wonder where the developers’ real strengths lay.

Sometimes, late at night when the moon is full and no one is around, I’ll download the Emacs source. Then, I’ll make a single change. Maybe rename a variable or a function, or comment something out. Then, I’ll recompile it and put the binary on my website for people to download. But I won’t provide the source of my changes! Muahahahaha.