Follow the Crane

My brother Mike has put up his album on iTunes named Follow the Crane. Check it out!

BootChamp 1.0

I have released a new version of my application BootChamp (featured last year on Macworld.com). This new version adds a menu item in your menu bar so you can quickly boot into Windows, similarly to how you can boot back to Mac OS X from within Windows.

The application can also behave like the previous version, where it’ll start the booting process immediately upon launching. To enable this, open Terminal and enter defaults write com.kainjow.BootChamp DefaultBehavior 1. To change it back, simply use a 0 instead.

Lastly, the application is smaller than before, at only 28 KB. Download

Update: new 1.0.1 version is out that fixes a few bugs.

MoyoTalk

MoyoTalk Preview

This is my first iPhone app that I’ve been working on the side for the last few months.

“Could not open a new pseudo-tty.” error

Getting this error in Terminal? Xcode keep stalling out on you while building? Try force quitting all gcc* and cc* processes in Activity Monitor.

iPhone SDK beta 6

The 6th beta of the iPhone SDK has been posted. Unfortunately the release notes are under NDA, but I will just say they finally got around to adding an extremely needed feature.

I’ll be going to WWDC in a about 10 days, and hopefully they’ll have the SDK finalized by then. Can’t wait.

It has arrived

The iPhone SDK is here, and it is slick.

Don’t Pollute User Space

From Apple’s documentation:

With the exception of the ~/Library directory, your application should never install files into the user’s home directory. In particular, you should never install files into a user’s Documents directory or into the /Users/Shared directory. These directories should only be modified by the user.

I wish Microsoft and Adobe understood this.

Leopard 10.5.2 fixes NSShadow bug

One of the annoyances I found in Leopard was NSShadow’s shadowOffset didn’t work exactly the same as it did under Tiger. It was always drawn 1 pixel off. I use NSShadow for drawing the “etched text” appearance that is now prevalent in Leopard. Fortunately, I just found out that 10.5.2 now fixes this so that 10.5.2 and 10.4.X both draw shadows the same way. You can read more from the Cocoa mailing list archives.

QuickLook plugin for AppleScripts

I have written a small QuickLook plugin that gives you a preview of an AppleScript script file.

It’s a quick and dirty implementation since I used NSAppleScript. I’m sure a more generic method using normal syntax highlighting would be better.

Download

Read .webloc URLs from the command line

Need to read the URL of a .webloc file from the command line?

All you need is this simple line:

strings SomeFile.webloc/rsrc | grep http | head -n 1