Gus Mueller, you’re the man!

Being a graphic designer myself, I have always tended to somewhat orient my projects towards the graphic side of life. Randleaf, my ‘abstract artist killer’ rendering tool, actually has a pretty complicated source tree in which two images are supposed to match exactly (if Randleaf receives the same data) as the rendering portion isn’t changed often in one branch. Gus Mueller makes FlySketch, a Cocoa app that also does graphic tasks (I don’t feel like going deeply into what it does here) and needless to say, it’s very important that two versions of FlySketch between builds make the same image after say, applying a fixed set of transformations or other application-specific functions.

The excellent, excellent Late Night Cocoa podcast (guys, I am donating, the ‘cast rocks) had an interview about a month back with Gus and it was about automated builds, source control (SVN) and unit testing. Nothing new to me, apart from unit testing; I hadn’t given it a lot of thought, but after the podcast (which I could conveniently listen to while washing the dishes thanks to my new Nano) I was amazed by the simplicity and elegance of such a solution for your built products. It also makes me painful bi-daily reminders of my sloppy code revisions and frequent refitting of the rendering engine. I must say, Gus, you saved my life code-wise.

I am doing a lot of different projects now. While I do give Randleaf some attention, I have taken a look at HMBlkAppkit (by the guys at Shiira, mad props), an open-source framework that you can use to make very beautiful black panels, and I think I’ll do a small app to demonstrate what I think it can do very well, and what developers should do with it. It should really be a one-day project, but it has turned out to be a bit slow in development, seeing it doesn’t have a lot of priority. But it’s getting there.

I have read up more on OS X security on the application level - especially Widget and Cocoa malware. The notion of a ‘widget-wall’ that makes widget resource control (a widget’s access to local or network resources, for example) as easy as Dashcode makes it is really a necessity for any security-consicous user, but it’s apparently not out there. The same goes for my complaints in my last post; why has nobody tried to read out a battery life status from their iPod for easy showing in the OS X menu bar? It’s quite possible (I have looked into it, and from here I think it’s about a day or three to a working app that does just this).

Convenient? Well, I wouldn’t even care if nobody uses it. It’s just essential to me. My nano, first of all, doesn’t seem to be able to show me it’s battery status accurately and without having to pick it up. iPod shuffles are even worse.

I am also working on a quick and dirty Quartz Composer how-to. I can spend hours in QC just making visualisations for music and doing miscellaneous stuff. Mostly, Quartz is also something i want to use when I finish a long-time standing project involving making the terminal prettier. So there’s a lot of stuff coming up, along with this first May post. I hope you regular readers and new arrivals enjoy this month of fast-paced releases and innovations from my side.