The vonBelow.Com Weblog - OS X Dev

iPhone Bezier Path Demo

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 23:12:19 +0100

Just for my own internal use I created a little Bezier Path Demo for the iPhone.

Enjoy:

http://github.com/below/iphone-bezierdemo/tree

Finally: OS X 10.5.3 allows remote TimeMachine Backup

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:48:46 +0200

Today's update of OS X Leopard, 10.5.3. brings an excellent new feature:

Remote TimeMachine Backups!

All you need is one Mac with a TimeMachine Backup Volume, and it will be detected by all other machines running 10.5.3.

My hint for the first backup is however to connect the machines by ethernet, rather than wireless. The inital backup can take a loooong time.

Rotation using gestures

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:55:02 +0100

Inspirered by an entry on the CocoaDex Weblog, I made a little sample application for the rotation gesture. I still am not sure what the "standardRotationThreshold" is used for.

Rotate View Project

EDIT: URL has been fixed

StonerView Universal

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:13:57 +0200

After yesterday's port of ElectropaintOSX, here is the other Mac incarnation of it: StonerView, originally ported to the Mac by Tommaso Pecorella

Download 53,814 byte Disk Image (dmg)
Source 50,723 byte Disk Image (dmg)

Without modifications, you will need Xcode 2.5 or better to build the source. For Xcode 2.4, the SDK paths will have to be adjusted

Electropaint Universal

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 20:58:10 +0200

In the early nineties I worked with Silicon Graphics machines, and was very imporessed with the screen saver: Electropaint. In those days it was well suited to show off the graphics power of the machine.
Luckily, a few years ago, Electropaint has been ported in various forms. A friend of mine made the Windows port of StonerView and now I finally got around to the Universal port of ElectropaintOSX. Unfortunately, I was not able to find the current source code for StonerView Mac. When I do, I will port that to OS X as well.

Download ElectropaintOSX 0.3 207,501 byte Image (DMG)

System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later

Electropaint is a US Trademark of Tristram Visual, www.tristram.com

Note to self: Symbol generation script

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Thu, 24 May 2007 16:32:22 +0200

Not sure if anybody but me needs that, but I find the setup time for Kernel Debugging quite taxing. So, to make life a little easier, I made the following startup script on my target machine:

#!/bin/sh
KitPath="$HOME/KernelDebugKit/"
address=`/usr/sbin/kextstat | perl -ne 'if (m/(0x\w+)\s+0x\w+\s+0x\w+\s+com\.apple\.iokit\.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily/) { print "$1\n"} ' `

/sbin/kextload -c -e -k "${KitPath}mach_kernel" -n -z -r "${KitPath}" -a com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily@$address -s /tmp/ ~/KernelDebugKit/IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily.kext

scp /tmp/com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily.sym DEBUGMACHINE.local:/tmp/

This script will find the load address and generate the symbols from the IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily and push them onto my debugging machine for gdb. The script is quick and dirty, but maybe it is of use to someone

A more chatty IOKit

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Wed, 23 May 2007 13:21:17 +0200

While I was debugging my driver, I found out that you can raise the verbosity of the IOKit. As I did not find this tip documented anywhere on the Web, I thought I share it with you.

Many parts of the IOKit check the variable gIOKitDebug for certain bits, and log accordingly.

Continue reading "A more chatty IOKit"

WWDC Treffen OSXEntwickerforum.de

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Wed, 09 May 2007 15:39:00 +0200

Wir sollten auch ein offizielles OSXEntwicklerforum.de Treffen veranstalten, ich habe im Forum ja schon Vorschläge gemacht: Montag Abend, 20:30, und wahrscheinlich ist das Chevy's die beste Idee.

Wer kommen will kann ja an diesen Beitrag einen Kommentar (am besten mit eMail) anhängen.

WWDC 2007 San Francisco

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Wed, 02 May 2007 15:39:56 +0200

Now that just a year has passed, here is a new entry!

I will be attending the Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2007 in San Francisco, arriving June 8th and staying till June 16th.
If you would like to schedule a meeting in San Francisco in that timeframe, just drop me a note.

Especially for this event I have added a new category, I which I and members of the German OSX Entwicklerforum might post some entries.

If you would like to post entries in that categorie, just let me know.

Pitfall for Developers: HFS+ Case-Sensitive

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 00:26:58 +0100

Just recently I discovered that some software would fail to work on partitions that are case-sensitive. My partitions are mostly case-sensitive because I develop some stuff for Linux (which often has case-sensitive file systems).

So, be sure to test your applications on case-sensitive partitions. You can easily create a disk image and mount it for this purpose.

In the case your application needs to know if it is running on a case sensitive partition, here is some sample code. There are many ways to find out the vRefNum, depending on what you have to start with. In this case, I am assuming a path, but you can also get a vRefNum for a BSD partition or other things.

Sample Code follows:
Continue reading "Pitfall for Developers: HFS+ Case-Sensitive"

Smart Crash Reporter

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 17:40:05 +0100

Oy vey, it has been a while since I posted something here...

Anyhow, I would like to make both Developers and Non-Developers aware of Smart Crash Reporter, which has caused some weird behavior. Therefore, I recommend

Bill Bumgarter's Weblog which includes instructions on how to remove SCR. It also has some more insight, including what alternatives developers can use instead.

Also, please check the excellent Daring Fireball piece on this discussion.

User Defaults, NSPopUpButton and Bindings

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:43:59 +0200

Sometimes the simple things can be complicated if you are used to complicated scenarios. After successfully using Cocoa Bindings for a lot of things, I wanted something really simple:

Let the user set a default settings with an NSPopUpButton. The setting actually is an integer, but I would like to present some text to the user.

Continue reading "User Defaults, NSPopUpButton and Bindings"

If User Interface Themes were people

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 12:45:10 +0200

I found this piece, and it is funny as hell, enjoy:

The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme

Transparent iChat icons

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 14:13:54 +0200

For quite a while I have tried to find out how to create transparent iChat avatars like the funky Apple sample icons. But saving images in gif, tiff, png, with or without alpha channel did not help.

My friend Julius (macrocka.com) now found the secrect:

The image must not be larger than 48 x 48 pixels. Other than that it should be a gif, with transparency set. No alpha channel needed.

Widearea Bonjour

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:56:00 +0200

I had always been very interested in using Apple's TTFNAR beyond the local subnet, as it is really a great technology. Stuart Cheshire pointed me to dns-sd.org which has a good article on setting up your own Bonjour DNS Server.

However, some questions remain unanswered on the site, so this is my attempt to prepare a little FAQ compiled from some questions and answers from the Bonjour mailing list.

Q: Do I need special hardware to use DNS-SD?
A: Yes, you need a router which supports a port mapping protocol (UPnP). Most newer gateways do, I will try to list some examples

Q: When I check the resolution of my bonjour server (e.g. `dig bonjour.example.com`), everything looks fine but I do not get an answer section:
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
A: That is OK. You don't really need to have an address record for your Bonjour domain. As long as you have an NS record for the domain, mDNSResponder will know where to send the updates

Q: I think I have set up everything correctly, but I still can not register services with my server from the Bonjour Preference Pane. What am I doing wrong?
A: Check the console. You may find somethink like:
Jun 16 12:27:51 Tigerbook mDNSResponder: ERROR: mDNS_SetSecretForZone - could not convert shared secret **************** from base64
This can mean that the password actually was saved as a series of stars (a bug in the current version of the pane). Re-enter your password and try again.