Well but a few days ago I finished my first sizeable Cocoa application. It has been wildly ruminated in the academic community that Mary Shelly’s novel, Frankenstein, is actually a meditation on the creative process of creating a novel. Originally one starts with the highest of aims, through a series of deals with the devil one manages to make something come to life, but that thing is inherently unholy, can’t be controlled, and winds up going out and killing indiscriminately. I feel the same way about my first sizable Cocoa application - no I do not think that it is going to run rampant on a murderous spree, asking all sorts of questions about Kantian morality on the way - rather, it started off with the purest of noble intentions.

I bought the ecto blogging software for OSX. I’m really enjoying it and getting the hang of using it instead of the MT tool itself.

More pictures!

Well my friends in the blogosphere it’s been a while since I, like Jim Anchower, rapped at ya. It’s been pretty hectic. Here’s what’s new. When last I was posting you were seeing posts from beautiful Frascati, Italy. Obviously I took the big ol’ jet-airplane back to the US and arrived just fine. The flight was long and a bit more grueling than I recall. The real cursable thing about flying west from Europe is that if you catch a morning flight, you really feel quite compelled to stay awake the duration of the flight. Assuming you’ve gotten your body on the Continental clock, you’re feeling like “Oh, it’s 11 am, lunchtime, etc.

I just wanted to make a quick update that my laser-vision install has, thus far, only been used for the powers of good, not evil. I have used it to: Drive Read the drink menu at Ryowa in Mountain View Discover the time from the red LED alarm clock on the other side of the bed Discover that girlfriend’s expression did not mean “hey good looking” but “what are you doing now?!” So far the real inconvenient bit is taking a bazillion eye drops every hour or so. You have to let them each absorb so by the time you finish one hour’s cycle, you’re about ready to start another.

Because I’m putting the finishing touches (well, it wasn’t finishing touches when it was “getting the damned thing working) on a Cocoa application… ….and getting a house set-up ….and my mom coming to visit ….and I’m working on my submission to The Mellies ….and I’ve been doing some writing ….and I’ve been crazy busy at work… I just need a few more days to get around some difficult problems. Be back soon, with my first really functioning Cocoa program.

Well, as I said in my previous post, I’ve been pretty busy at work and at home. While I won’t go into the great details of the former (too much background required to appreciate it) I’ve completed my first Cocoa Program: SudokuGrid. SudokuGrid is a tool that will let you enter a grid that you find (from a book, off the internet, etc.) and will let you solve it. It’s still a very early release, but it’s such a big milestone I feel like I have to share it with the world. Furthermore, I need to take a bit of a break from it.

I have finished my first program: SudokuGrid. Here’s what it looks like. This is the starting grid. It’s blank here, but you can see the “alignment highlighter.” As those of you who work Sudokus (Sudokii?) know, you can’t have a conflict within the 3x3 grid, along the horizontal, or along the vertical. These guides help with that. Now you might think that entering a “given” set of numbers would be a real pain, having to change the selection to 1-9, click in the cell, make the change, look at your source, etc. To this point I added the “fastFill” feature. By entering the numbers (and “-” for blanks) you can fill a grid quite quickly!

I finished the application, have fun running it on MacOSX 10.4+ machines.

When I last undertook to teach myself Cocoa, about a year and a half ago, one technique in particular seemed poorly documented, mysterious, and generally lacking intelligible example that didn’t involve pulling out advanced trigonometry books. If, by chance, you are searching on these terms and you should find my site here, I should hope that I make your life a goodly bit easier by giving you a simple example with concrete explanations. Thanks to the proliferation of people liking Mac OSX, a great many tutorials on the topic have surfaced, but as you’re asking “How do I turn my image about 90 degrees” these tutorials are a bit “heavy” and confusing.

I always write this program, for pretty much any programming language I know: Java, Perl + CGI, and now Cocoa. I have always learned new information particularly well through either stories or through flash cards. The former, while poetic and colorful lacks the portability and immediacy of the latter. During college you would find me reading the material, making notes, turning the notes to cards, or reviewing the cards. It was through this method that I memorized the rules of logic (modus tollens, DeMorgan’s Theorem), Dutch Irregular verbs (zijn, was/waren, geweest), French Irregular verbs (_ai, as , a, avons, avez, ont).

As promised earlier, my application is now available (with source) for download.

I think the balance has shifted again, I think I’m going back to Firefox as my default browser. The add-ons are amazing. Mozilla as a platform for new ideas simply rules ( from a user perspective ) I always liked type-ahead find, an emacs thing that I think should be everywhere The render time isn’t notably better on Safari anymore Safari keeps barfing on the JavaScript on my netflix queue. I visit that thing often enough that barfing on the site and taking out my browser state is a major problem. The issue that ruins my Firefox experience when i’m forced to use a PC experience, memory leaks, doesn’t seem to be a problem on OSX.