Posts tagged Cocoa at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Posts with tag cocoa

MacGDBp Kills PHP Bugs Dead!

Posted Jun 16th 2008 10:30AM by Steven Sande
Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Open Source, Developer

Bothered with pesky PHP bugs? Grab a can of MacGDBp and exterminate those bugs FAST!

18 year-old Beantown open source whiz Robert Sesek has announced that he'll be releasing his MacGDBp project bright and early on Tuesday, June 17 at his Blue Static website.

MacGDBp builds on the open source Xdebug application to provide a native Cocoa Leopard-only app for remote debugging of PHP scripts. Connect to your running PHP script and you can do instruction stepping to see how your script is working. You can set breakpoints, view the current function call stack, and look at all local variable values.

Robert noted that MacGDBp is designed to be very familiar to anyone who has spent time using the Xcode debugger. He's releasing the app under the GNU GPL version 2, which (duh) means it is available at no cost.

If you do any work with PHP (hey, I'm constantly customizing WordPress myself), MacGDBp may be your new best friend. Be sure to set an iCal alarm for Tuesday morning and get your copy of MacGDBp.

Thank you, Robert, for telling us about your app!

Updated to add correct date

Bookwatch: Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X gets updated

Posted May 25th 2008 10:30PM by Nik Fletcher
Filed under: Books, Developer

Way back in December, our Christmas Gift Guide featured our pick of the many OS X-related books out there. One of the recommendations was the (very excellent) Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass - commonly referred to as 'The Bible' in the Mac development community.

At the time the book was a little outdated -- however in the last couple of weeks an updated third edition has been published. New sections feature Objective-C 2.0, Core Data, Garbage Collection, Xcode 3 and Core Animation, meaning this third edition is all ready for many of the new technologies in Mac OS X Leopard.

At just $32 (via Amazon.com), this updated version clearly ought to be on every developer's bookshelf (and aspiring developer's wishlist).

Video Introduction to Cocoa

Posted May 23rd 2008 5:00PM by Mat Lu
Filed under: Video, Developer, Found Footage

Over at Theocacao Scott Stevenson has posted the video of his Introduction to Cocoa talk (entitled "Best of Both Worlds") aimed at those who want to learn a bit about Apple's preferred API for building OS X applications. The talk runs to over 90 minutes and includes "an introduction to Xcode, Interface Builder, Objective-C, Mac UI standards and more."

For anyone who has ever wanted to figure out what those developers tools are all about this is definitely worth (the rather large) download (scroll down towards the bottom) though it seems that a lot of folks are have problems getting the whole file (myself included). There's also a torrent available.

Apple, Adobe, and 64-bit Photoshop

Posted Apr 3rd 2008 1:00PM by Mat Lu
Filed under: OS, Software, Developer

Adobe's announcement that Photoshop CS4 will be 32-bit only on OS X has the Mac web buzzing today. Accusations of blame are being shot at both Adobe and Apple by various pundits (though notably not by the companies themselves). Fortunately, some of the better Mac pundits are also weighing in with interesting opinions on this development.

Over at Ars, John Siracusa has penned an interesting historical account of the relationship of Adobe and Apple, and the Carbon API which is at the center of the controversy. He somewhat grimly sees this Photoshop development as the furthering of bad blood between the two companies and suggests that "the real storm may be yet to come" as Adobe and Apple clash over Flash and Air, etc. (witness the Flash on iPhone kerfuffle).

Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber takes up the question of CS5 -- i.e. the next version of Photoshop after the aforementioned CS4 -- which will be biggest Cocoa port ever attempted. He points out the interesting difference between Photoshop and Microsoft Office in that the former shares a codebase between Windows and OS X, while the latter represents two completely separate projects on the two platforms. The big question is whether Adobe will even be able to pull off the Cocoa port in time and maintain its cross-platform nature (though as both Johns have pointed out, Lightroom bodes well in this regard).

In any case, this drama is just beginning to play itself out and depending on how you look at it we're in for a good many years of entertainment or frustration as the Cocoa transition of Photoshop progresses (never mind the next version of Office).

Cocoa developer time-saver: SparkleZip 1.1

Posted Dec 29th 2007 4:30PM by Brett Terpstra
Filed under: Freeware, Developer

Sparkle is an open-source module for Cocoa that allows developers to add that cool "Check for Updates" and auto-install feature with relative ease; it's used by some of our favorite applications. If you already knew that, then you might be part of the small but important group of people who would be interested in SparkleZip.

SparkleZip is a free utility with a very self-explanatory name. Drag your application onto its icon and it will read your CFBundleVersion and generate a properly named zip file, ready for appcasting. It's a few seconds shaved off of release time and a great way to prevent mishaps, given that the current version of Sparkle is not overly forgiving once an appcast is published. Meanwhile, those seconds you just saved can go towards working on your next release which, by the way, we heard was going to be awesome.

Update: Due to an editing error, the post originally implied that TextMate is a Sparkle-enabled application. Although it's listed among the apps on the Sparkle wiki, Allan has said that he does not use Sparkle to handle TextMate updates. Our apologies for the mixup.

Learn Cocoa with your free time this holiday

Posted Dec 24th 2007 8:15PM by Scott McNulty
Filed under: Apple, Developer

Let's face it, during the holiday season we all need to take a little break from our families (even though we love them). Why not do something productive when you're squirreled away in that spare bedroom hiding in the bed from your Aunt Dora? Cocoa Dev Central has just updated their great Cocoa tutorial for Leopard. I am just a simple blogger, and I could follow along so I am sure you smart readers out there will be whipping up apps lickety-split.

THCanvasView: Icon viewer for Cocoa apps

Posted Oct 12th 2007 10:00AM by Mike Schramm
Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Odds and ends, Open Source, Developer

Scott Stevenson has dropped a pretty handy Finder-like view interface for Cocoa applications called THCanvasView. I don't do a ton of Cocoa programming, but even I can see how handy this is-- Scott's coded almost all the functionality of Finder, including resizing of icons, image previews, Cocoa bindings awareness, and repositioning within the view, and it's available right there as a free download under a BSD license for your own application.

He's also included a short wrapper app called CorkBoard designed just to show off what the viewer does. Very cool indeed. If you're working on a new Cocoa application (at least before Leopard comes out and shows us all how applications should really look in 2008), it could be just what you're looking for in a file interface.

In which, iPhone apps are built

Posted Jul 30th 2007 12:00PM by Erica Sadun
Filed under: iPhone

It turns out that creating new GUI iPhone apps is both harder and easier than you expect. Saturday night when the first iPhone UI app proof-of-concept appeared, I was tied up with family. I frantically emailed Mike Rose begging him to get a post out, which, wonderful man that he is, he did. Sunday, I grabbed what time I could, intent on testing out the new developer toolchain produced by Nightwatch and company. In summary: if you can wait for an already-compiled binary toolchain to emerge, do so.

The developers have done all they can to make building the tools as simple a process as possible. The folks on the irc.osx86.hu #iphone-uikit channel are helpful and supportive. But the bottom line is pre-alpha means pre-alpha. There many rough compiling patches along the way where I ended up hitting my head against the wall, convinced I could never get the tools built. I had to edit the source several times to get it to compile on my Intel Mac Mini.

Continue reading In which, iPhone apps are built

RubyCocoa 0.11.0 released

Posted May 24th 2007 6:30PM by Mat Lu
Filed under: Developer

RubyCocoa is a nifty "bridge" between Ruby and Objective-C (the language of Cocoa), that allows developers to "write full-stack Cocoa applications in Ruby" or a "Cocoa application that mixes Ruby and Objective-C code." It has just received a major update to version 0.11.0. The release notes list the considerable changes; these include compatibility with Ruby 1.9, support for Quartz Composer, support for 64-bit applications and much more. As it happens, I've been slowly learning Ruby, so I'm looking forward to learning how to use RubyCocoa to build Mac applications with Ruby on the back-end.

RubyCocoa is free and open source; it's a free download from SourceForge.

[via MacResearch]

Learn Cocoa, Part II

Posted Feb 18th 2007 2:00PM by Mat Lu
Filed under: How-tos, Developer

When we posted about Part I of Scott Stevenson's Learn Cocoa tutorial, some people complained that there wasn't actually any coding involved. Well Part II at least introduces what Scott calls "Thinking in Code" and begins to dig a little deeper into what is required to actually use Xcode to write a Cocoa application. Obviously, Scott is moving very slowly, as yet again he requires no previous experience, but his lavishly illustrated guide is a pleasure to behold. He holds out the promise of more such guides in the future, provided some donations are forthcoming. Given how well he's done so far, I hope that comes to pass. Check it out at Cocoa Dev Central.

Cocoa Blogs, by Scott Stevenson

Posted Dec 12th 2006 2:00PM by David Chartier
Filed under: Software, Blogs, Developer

I have to admit right up front that I'm not as familiar with the Mac dev community as I'd like to be. I don't know a lick about developing, and I get a bit intimidated as I know it's one of those trades that has a completely different set of constraints and connotations to manage; there's nothing like trying to swim in the big kid's pool while still wearing floaties. Though, for the record: that's just an analogy; I don't wear floaties when swimming in real life. I got rid of those months ago.

That said, I'd like to pass along Cocoa Blogs, a new venture from Scott Stevenson, whose name I only know from its mention on a number of Mac developers' blogs I've stumbled across from time to time. As you might glean from the title, Scott waxes on Cocoa, one of Apple's major (and dare I say preferable?) programming environment for Mac OS X, as well as the world of development and its community. He also wrangles a number of Cocoa developer resources and notable blogs for skills both advanced and new.

While much of the language in Scott's code-oriented posts and links might as well be Latin to me (and no, you don't get points for noting that up to 80% of English is Latin-based), this looks like a great new resource for Cocoa developers in all walks of life.

[via Gus Mueller]

The Cocoa Conundrum

Posted Oct 31st 2006 2:00PM by Victor Agreda, Jr.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Cult of Mac, Freeware, Open Source, Developer

When it comes to software on the Mac platform it's a mixed bag. I don't mean like on Windows, where the bag is full of snakes, scorpions, rusty blades, and the occasional bit of peach. Software on the Mac has been in flux for a decade. When Apple bought NeXT, most of us figured Copland was dead in the water (and it was). Personally, I wish we'd seen OpenDoc come to fruition, but that comes from years of dealing with bloatware. OS X pushed the "Classic" Mac OS further and further into the shadows, until, with the advent of Intel Macs, it's pretty much dying off... Read the fine print on these Leopard features for developers, and you'll realize how dead "Classic" really is. Perhaps we should call it "Relic."

Now ask anyone (well, almost anyone) who's coded Cocoa apps and they'll tell you it's lovely. Shoot, Apple's so proud of the frameworks they provide for devs, they even touted a new one, Core Animation, as one of the 10 things coming in Leopard. But we're still living a dual-existence (triple or quadruple or more, if you get technical) in that you have Cocoa apps, and you have the non-Cocoa apps. Perhaps you know about Java, which is what Limewire uses. Or X11's ability to run apps like GIMP. Both of those have their quirks. Java apps can be all over the place, and X11 doesn't integrate the UI of OSX, among other issues. Carbon is a mix of old-skool API's (implemented in good ol' C if I recall), and permeates Mac apps like Office and Photoshop, where a teardown/rebuild would be too unwieldy. There's also the fact that key apps like Finder and QuickTime are Carbon enough to still have some legacy code from way back when, which might account for some of their quirks too... No holy wars about Cocoa vs. Carbon, OK? I'm with David Weiss on this one. So you have Cocoa, Carbon and everything else.

Getting granular for a moment, look at a tale of two browsers: Safari vs. Firefox. Safari is a Cocoa app, and it is tightly integrated with OS X tools. It maintains the ability to look up words in the Dictionary app with a right-click, and access the OS X Keychain. Firefox is not a (full) Cocoa app, and you can't niftily use a keyboard shortcut to look up a word, nor will it store passwords in Keychain. I've learned to use this "wall" to my advantage. Since the passwords are stored differently, I can automatically log in to systems (like gmail) using two accounts simultaneously. I use my business gmail on one browser, and personal on the other. Unfortunately, you're limited to 3, as all Firefox-based browsers will share their version of Keychain, and all Webkit-derived browsers use Keychain. I say three, because Opera stands alone (and doesn't always play nice with Gmail). There's the conundrum: to the average user, they don't care, but when little non-Cocoa quirks appear, they scratch their heads and wonder why the Mac doesn't just "do stuff" one standard way.

Keep reading for my take on shareware, freeware, and malware in OS X...

Continue reading The Cocoa Conundrum

C4 Tip: Drag-and-drop text in Cocoa apps

Posted Oct 21st 2006 9:00PM by Dan Pourhadi
Filed under: Software, Other Events, Apple

During The Grube's UI presentation at C4, he pointed to one particular example of "functional inconsistency" in Apple's software: the discrepancy in results when you drag-and-drop text in Carbon apps (TextWrangler, AppleWorks, etc.) vs. Cocoa apps (TextEdit, Safari, etc.).

When you select text in Carbon applications, you're able to drag the text by simply clicking the selection and dragging it. In Cocoa apps, however, you need to click the selected text and hold the mouse button down for a fraction of a second before you're able to drag it. Your cursor changes from the text selector to the pointer. But clicking and immediately dragging results in you re-selecting the text.

The Cocoa differentiation is a result of NeXT designing a way to enable both dragging and re-selecting, which was carried into OS X.

It's a minor inconsistency, but has frustrated me countless times. Glad that's all cleared up.

Thanks John!

Cocoa Dev Central redesign launches

Posted Oct 10th 2006 4:30PM by Scott McNulty
Filed under: Software, Odds and ends, Apple

I couldn't code Cocoa if my life depended on it (I can hardly blog as it is), but I am fascinated by developers, the development cycle, and the products that result. It is no wonder, then, that I have been a fan of Cocoa Dev Central for quite a while.

They just redesigned the site, and I must say that I dig it. The content is well organized, the design is clean, and there is a link to TUAW (what more could a blogger want?).

Check it out if you are looking for good Cocoa resources, and be sure to send TUAW a copy of the press release for your new app once you get the hang of Cocoa.

CocoaFox Minefield

Posted Aug 17th 2006 10:00AM by Dan Lurie
Filed under: Software, Freeware, Internet, Internet Tools, Open Source

Firefox is fantastic... on Windows. I don't think there is much argument that Firefox is sorely lacking when it comes to fitting in to the OS X environment. Camino is a great alternative for those seeking a browser with the Gecko engine, but it doesn't have nearly the flexibility and expandability of true-blue Firefox. Lucky for those who wish to keep the expandability of the Fox but have a sleek Mac-like browser, Mozilla has started development on a Cocoa based version of FireFox codenamed Minefield. Being a native application, the Minefield will have all the goodies of a real Mac browser like native GUI objects and OS X spell checking. Before you all rush off and announce that this is your next main browser, keep in mind that these are early development builds, and crashes, missing features, and bugs all come with the territory. Running Minefield from a disk image broke my dock, and I had to restart the dock process to get it working again.

[via MacUser]

Next Page >

#	Blogger	Posts	Cmts
1	Cory Bohon	89	1
2	Robert Palmer	64	44
3	Steven Sande	58	22
4	Scott McNulty	40	0
5	Mat Lu	40	10
6	Dave Caolo	37	0
7	Erica Sadun	28	2
8	Brett Terpstra	23	0
9	Mike Schramm	20	1
10	Michael Rose	11	32
11	Christina Warren	10	38
12	Joshua Ellis	3	2
13	Lisa Hoover	2	6
14	Chris Ullrich	2	2

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MacGDBp Kills PHP Bugs Dead!

Bookwatch: Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X gets updated

Video Introduction to Cocoa

Apple, Adobe, and 64-bit Photoshop

Cocoa developer time-saver: SparkleZip 1.1

Learn Cocoa with your free time this holiday

THCanvasView: Icon viewer for Cocoa apps

In which, iPhone apps are built

RubyCocoa 0.11.0 released

Learn Cocoa, Part II

Cocoa Blogs, by Scott Stevenson

The Cocoa Conundrum

C4 Tip: Drag-and-drop text in Cocoa apps

Cocoa Dev Central redesign launches

CocoaFox Minefield

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