CocoiaCast Episode One: Secure E-Mail.

The Cocoia Blog has seen a lot of hyped terms on it — but not this one yet. Say hello to the first episode of Cocoia-Cast; about Cocoa, security on the Mac, and design with Macs in general. I hope you enjoy it.

The first episodes are about securing your communications; first securing Mail in this episode, in the second I will look at securing IM, and the third and final part will be about securing your surfing.

Link to Youtube (low res)

Download .torrent (Please do, eases the load on the server!)

Praetorian Update: April 2007

Hello beta testers, time for an update.

Praetorian has been rolling steadily towards it’s Public Beta release candidate. As I have seen the trouble with compiling your own, I will make the latest sources of FreeRADIUS available as binary packages upon release, to save you the hassle. From there on, Praetorian will show you how your network’s going (the information architecture has been thrown upside down here, since the last preview) and your server is.

Regardless of your understanding of computers, Praetorian will allow you to set up a Mac in your network to be a RADIUS server. This means you can let people log into your wireless or wired network with a username and password, or simply filter people based on hardware (MAC) addresses.
Praetorian has assistants for these tasks built in. If you have an Airport, it’s just a few clicks away to a super-secure network.

The release candidate now has a probable release date and some features left undiscussed recently.

- New IndieHIG-compliant custom interface widgets.
- If licenses allow, a blazing fast scanning method to keep tabs on people online.
- Full document support; Praetorian’s own document type, raddb format, and SQL.
- Unlimited Undo functionality.
- Spotlight integration.
- Unparalleled security methods; passwords are stored in the keychain and kept in memory in an encrypted state.
- A separate Leopard version ready for release when OS X 10.5 is released.

Cocoia expects to start public beta as soon as June 10th, culminating with the launch of the Cocoia Beta Panel, but expects at least one pre-release candidate beta release before commencing testing on the final branch.

Sign up for beta by email

.

My birthday is coming up.

Wow, how news-worthy. Anyway, just the time to show your support for me as a blogger that believes in blogs without ads, quality daily content (if time allows me) and quality design. I am putting my wishlist on here, who knows. Any support is appreciated, even words.

My list is topped by a desirable piece of electronics that Daniel recently blogged about (oh yeah, Daniel, email me, my offer still stands ;)).

iPod Nano

Number One. I’d love to have an iPod Nano for my birthday. It’s a great piece of electronics and I got so much music and podcasts I want to follow everywhere that I think it will become an extension of my body.

More Comments

Number Two. I’d love people to be more verbal. Are you doubting if you are going to type those thoughts? Please do. I love input, I cannot stress this enough. Email me, write me, comment on this page, blog this site. Even the most nonsensical input is encouraged because it is encouraging to me and makes me want to continue this ad-less, quality-content effort.

Beta Testers

Number Three. Yes, you read that right. I still need people with G4 and G5 (especially G5 models) Macs to test applications. Sign up by sending me an email.

Anything other than that is welcome too. My birthday’s the 29th of April, feel free to reach me on IM: (ICQ: 68695151; Jabber: cocoia@jabber.phranck.net; MSN: batterylife@gmail.com; Skype: caliform) or email me (see a few lines above).

Get your Cocoia Blog updates on Dashboard now.

OK, I got around to making a simple RSS widget for the blog to enjoy RSS on a lot of Macs with no RSS reader. Get it while it’s 0.3 ;).

Download the Cocoia Blog RSS widget

Now also on the Apple Dashboard showcase.
So, it’s very simple really; it shows the 5 most recent articles from the blog in a white-on-black manner. I am thinking about making two that are black and white with the artwork of Praetorian and iSight Expert, for the beta testers, with specific feeds for relevant news. Would you guys like that? Let me know.

Photoshop Extended. Inspiring and disappointing.

This is, well, really, really nice. I just got to play around with an actually legitimate copy of CS3 (it’s owner would rather not disclose it’s information) and it’s got anything we could need in the future to keep this program in power. Although I adore Open-Source… Guys, time to eat your heart out. I present you: 3d.

So, this could be anything, right? This could be a render I just opened in any beta of Photoshop. Let’s see about that. While I am at it, a little tutorial to retexture anything in Photoshop Extended.

So, this is a… (yes!) 3d layer. As you can see, it has a property: it’s texture. You can double click it, which results in this.

A beautiful texture. OK, not quite. Let’s invert.

OK, inverted the texture and saved. But hey, let’s push that a bit; let’s go swing the bottle around. Easy. As you can see in the screenshot below, it has video editing facilities for editing over several frames (including appropriate exporting) and it can even do some highly anticipated saving to .obj files and adding textures in a ‘clean’, Alias | Wavefront approved manner. Adobe almost makes it look like the feats have been there all along, making you feel right at home.

Swing swing. Oh, man, I am enjoying myself. I was lyrical when I first did this - I mean, look at this! This is Photoshop! It’s blazing fast.

Okay, there are some disappointing things. I, for one, like the new icons. But the new Help Viewer icon is abominable.

Like that’s not bad enough, this specific application pointed me to the most huge disappointment I have seen in Photoshop to date. WYSIWYG HTML editing is now just declared dead by Adobe, as the ’seamless integration’ of Photoshop and Dreamweaver consists of, brace yourself, copy and paste. Wow, I mean, it’s not like iWeb does the same thing. Or hell, any app I would just throw together in Cocoa with a Webview. Don’t believe me? Check this (15 minutes of copy-and-paste how-to alert).

So, what are my impressions of PS CS3 Extended? It’s great. The new features act like they have been there all along, although the lack of any new ‘Imageready’ PSD-file-to-website workflow is very, very disappointing. I hope we will see something that will fill the void.

Your Google queries inspire me.

Man, do you guys have ideas. There are some very interesting and less interesting ideas in the many Google search phrases that lead to this blog. We can dismiss the idea that Mac users aren’t so ‘into’ securing their computer; it’s an extensive list of people hacking away at various services and other tweaks that find themselves here. There are some people that get here by typing ‘boobs’ into Google (er? who are you people?), and there are various people looking for nice blog designs or ‘beautiful typography’.

What’s always more interesting, though, are the top queries. And there are only a few. One; iSight app. I made it quite high in that ranking. Then, the second, most interesting one; a black Xcode interface.

Black? Yes, you read that right. An Xcode with white text on a black background. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been coding white-on-black since day 1 (that, or a bit more forgiving color like red, orange, or blue on black). Check out my favorite TextMate theme, I mean, it speaks for itself. And I often prefer TextMating my code instead of using Xcode (something I hope sees an intense battle when Xcode 3.0 and Textmate 2.0 come out in… what is it now, October?).

Hey, let’s make some mockups. Although I think it will be next to impossible to attain, it would be nice to see if we can at least ’skin’ a small part of Xcode. I’ll go and see what I can do. In the mean time, keep Googling. Praetorian update, right here, today or tomorrow. And perhaps, I will abide by the weekly rule of typographic wednesday tomorrow as well.

Randleaf.

Okay, I’ve finally settled on a name. Randleaf is a modular 3d and 2d compositing graphic generator, for now quite slow. With the additions I made to the code today (gradient background and some other visualization tweaks), I am proud to say Randleaf has entered a whole new phase with it’s new graphics modes.

These two samples show a new, dynamic PNG overlay (great to trace back what I did) and gradient background support, which, in my opinion, adds a lot to the whole effect. Of course, I picked some good samples out of the 80-or so renders, but it does show what direction I am going.

Generating 2d abstracts.

I’ve had a lot of verbal reactions and discussions in the last few days over my novel ‘application’ that generates three-dimensional abstract imagery. The most prominent design feature I wanted to see was the generation of something I once had a ‘monopoly’ on in terms of tutorials; the so-called ‘tech circles’.

You can’t escape them in abstract art. Seemingly randomly generated, these circles feature all sorts of strange cutouts and details, sometimes text or small illustrations, and always layered. My whole adventure into OpenGL began a month ago, when I saw a movie; Ghost in the Shell 2. It had this completely cool way to visualize a computer-(more specifically, a firewall)’s running state. I won’t go into detail as to how it looks, I’d prefer you look at a screenshot (it’s actually FAR better in the movie, do check it out, after the ‘Dollhouse’ scene)

As you can see, it’s quite aesthetically pleasing. Stop to consider how this would look if this were to visualize, say, network activity, or my idea, firewall logs. This would be almost like iPulse in 3d (and ohh, do I love iPulse!). So, just blurting out in all honesty, I thought that was so horny, I just had to learn OpenGL and do something like this. I immediately ran into the obvious ‘it’s harder than it looks’, then entered the ‘ah, do I really have to do this with OpenGL?’ phase, and eventually settled with just picking up a good book. I made a horrible first mockup with a kqueue for checking the logs and a custom view. It wasn’t that great. So, I abandoned it for a while, working on my prime projects (Praetorian, iSight Expert) and well, messed with OpenGL in my spare time. Looked into Python application, the Cocoa / Quartz side of things, and got more interested. I am now considering to pick up a book on Quartz programming.

Back on topic; it’s been creating an array of objects and randomly assigning attribute values that brought me to these landscapes. After a while, you feel like testing your hardware and you just expand the array to see how far you can go. Fun ensued.
Now, having made my first real worthy GL-powered app, I want to expand on it’s functionality. I am doing expirimental hi-res (2000 px high and above) rendering, and trying to get the whole thing a bit more modular to make things like an external rendering application possible, and I want it’s product to be a more complete graphic. I could change some objects at random into letters and “+” marks, but that doesn’t really cut it for me (besides, they get swamped by the countless other objects or gruesomely distorted, which I can help but refuse to). In any case, I’ve tried to get more control on my produce, and it’s getting there… I now have the ability to magically dissolve a ‘room’.

The text and few ‘2d’ additions, as you can see, have been added with very sophisticated scripts. No, actually, it’s just a PNG with some lines and dots on it with text being changed per rendered frame. It will be quite trivial to just build a library of 2d graphics that this program can just apply on demand, but I am really looking for something that will generate me some 2d - like those tech circles. I hope I’ll round up a solution for that in the next month. Any thoughts are welcome, as usual.

Nailed that poster.

Wohoo, even more purdy images. I just had to show this one. It’s purrrrdy.
Dear iSight Expert and Praetorian Beta testers, there are some good things in the pipeline! I think I’ll do some updates tomorrow or in the next few days, perhaps release a definitive roadmap to releases.

My humble apologies for the extremely salt-less post I did yesterday, I really didn’t want to offend anyone with taste. It’s there for the stay. No more words on that.

Here is some homework I literally ‘let do’ in my sleep. Like I said to a classmate over IM; “it’s like a tiny Chinese fellow in a black box with Maya 6 and a keyboard shortcut for matrix extrude on fast-forward”. I’m taking suggestions to name this thing, I can’t seem to come up with anything better than the ‘Purdy-Image-O-Matic™”.

Without further ado, the poster;

It’s great to have the results of as little knowledge of these almighty tools we, as young coders of the ‘lazy’ generation, have — at least, I am just beginning. I haven’t ever used an Apple II. I didn’t write assembly on my 286. I did a lot of work with old stuff to compensate, longing for having been born in that age. It didn’t work out that way, so these days, I am just up in learning everything I think is great for expressing myself or making stuff work the way I want it to work.

Oh, before I forget, that’s a font I had to make for modular typography class. “Acreola”. I’m so carried away in this whole rant that I forgot all about that. What should I do with it? Burn it? Eat it? Give it with every odd copy of my software?

Comical relief.

I just -had- to do this.