My project, which shall for the moment remain nameless and therefore shrouded in a certain degree of mystery, seems to be going OK. Cocoa is making it refreshingly easy to work on the GUI itself, and the back-end code pretty much writes itself. Pretty neat, really. It's quite cool already, and although it doesn't do much yet it is beginning to look like an application rather than just a toy.

Of course, I still have some way to go before shipping the first version (or even a Beta for that matter), but progress so far has been reasonable. Another thing that I'm quite pleased about is that I haven't been slacking too much, which was always a worry starting to work for myself.

Posted by alastair at 5:29 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's surprising how difficult it is to design a good user interface. I mean a really great user interface, not like the rubbish most programmers come up with when asked to design a UI. They just don't think about how things are going to be used. (Apple can, of course, pat themselves firmly on the back for being good at this, but most other companies should take a look and see why their interfaces are so bad).

As for me, I've spent a great deal of time recently thinking about UI issues; my current dilemma is something of a horizontal vs. vertical problem... I have two user interface elements, one of which would look best horizontal, and the other of which would look best vertical (because it is a list of items, so a vertical layout will provide more space for the items' information). Unfortunately for me, they both have to have the same orientation (because of the way they interact). At the moment I'm leaning towards vertical, but we'll see.

Posted by alastair at 8:14 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just packaged-up anacron and put it on my site so that people don't have to figure-out how to install it themselves.

Posted by alastair at 9:56 AM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This has been frustrating me all day. I wanted to get the icons for a set of disks attached to my Mac, so I could display them in a dialog box. How hard could it be, I thought?

Finding the name of the icon file was OK; you just use the IORegistry functions, from which you can obtain a CFDictionary containing the name of the file and the bundle's identifier. And there's the sticking point. You can't (normally) get from an identifier to a bundle, unless the bundle is already loaded in your application…

Continue reading “Getting icons for disks in Cocoa” $raquo;

Posted by alastair at 3:43 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)