Noodlings

In IRC, someone noted how they just learned about gdb’s print-object (or po) command. It was surprising since this was an experienced dev. It just goes to show that no matter how long you’ve been programming, there’s always some thing you should know, but don’t. These are those commands or features you just somehow missed. You bitch about what a pain in the ass something is only to realize that there was a simple solution all along.

So, in the interest of full disclosure, here are a couple of mine.

NSStringFromRect(), NSStringFromRange(), NSStringFromPoint(), et al.

Stupidly, whenever I needed to log an NSRect, NSRange, etc., I’d list out each of the components. For NSRect, it was always the worst, as it would look like this:

NSLog(@"%f %f %f %f", NSMinX(rect), NSMinY(rect), NSWidth(rect), NSHeight(rect));

I could have put this in a #define but for some twisted reason I would just keep copying it from other places or worse, typing it out. I finally learned about the above functions and now my teeth are whiter than ever!

Dragging header files into IB

For years, when I needed to have the header file for my class read into IB, I’d click on the “Classes” tab, select my class, do “Read Files…” (because of peculiarities in my project, the “Read Something.h” item is not enabled) and select my file in the open panel. The step of clicking on the “Classes” tab seemed particularly ridiculous to me if you had an instance of the class selected in the “Instances” pane.

At the last Cocoaheads meeting, Cathy Shive was giving a presentation on doing custom controls. While demonstrating how she put together the nib, I watched in amazement as she dragged the header file into the IB window to update her outlets and actions. I suppressed a sob as I reflected on all the time I wasted.

Command-double-click and option-double-click in XCode

In XCode’s editor, command-double-clicking on a symbol will bring up its definition, opening the appropriate header file as needed. Option-double-click brings up its documentation. You know. Me no know. Me ashamed.

Maybe these are news to you as well and if so, then I feel slightly less dumb. There are probably worse cases than this but I have erased all traces of them from my memory.

What are your embarrassing discoveries?

Hazel 2.1 has just been released. One of the main focuses of this release was Leopard compatibility but what does this really mean?

In this case, it means that, for the most part, Hazel will work on Leopard as it did on Tiger. As other devs have pointed out ^{1, 2, 3}, we do not get the final version of Leopard any sooner than you do. Actually, unless we go into a store and pay for a copy on launch day, we will probably get it later.

The implications of this are that there could be changes that have occurred since the last prerelease and the final version that could break things and we won’t know until launch day. It’s a gamble but I’d rather have something usable in your hands the minute you upgrade to Leopard. This version addresses the known Leopard issues to date and should be ready to help organize your Stacks come August 26th.

As for the longer term roadmap with Hazel on Leopard: Hazel is not providing any special Leopard-only functionality currently. When will Hazel start using exclusive Leopard features or go fully Leopard-only? It’s hard to say. Leopard does provide some functionality that Hazel can take advantage of. But until I feel comfortable that a good number of my users have upgraded, I’ll try and support both Tiger and Leopard.

As a user, you do have the ability to influence this. When checking for updates, you have the option of sending anonymous data about your system. One of the things sent is your OS version (you can see all the data sent if you click on the “More Info…” button). Using this data, I can get a sense of Leopard adoption. If you want to be properly represented, then check the “Include anonymous profile” box in the update settings. I keep the data to myself and won’t do any bad things with it. Your participation will help guide Hazel’s future development so, if you’re not doing it already, please consider casting your vote in this manner.

So, in the end, I just want to clarify that there’s a bit of a juggling game here. I’ve tried to make sure that everything works as smoothly on Leopard as it does on Tiger. If it turns out that something changed in the final release or if I just flat out missed something, I’ll fix it. Leopard compatibility is not so much a state as it is a commitment.

As Apple is hurtling towards a Leopard release, we developers are scrambling to make sure our apps work. With the clock ticking down, I am making Hazel 2.1 beta available for testing. It should be Leopard compatible so if you have access to Leopard, I’d love it if you could download it and let me know how well it works.

I’ve also added a couple new features and a bunch of fixes so even if you are using Tiger, this release should have something of interest. For instance, you can now properly format the “Authors” Spotlight field so you don’t get the annoying parentheses and quotes (chalk that up to me stupidly using NSArray’s -description method). In any case, Hazel should be useful for replicating the iTunes folder structure of artist/album/song now.

I’m looking to go final with this next week so no time like the present to try and break things.

Enjoy: Hazel Beta page

Update (Oct. 16, 2007): It’s official. Leopard is shipping on October 26th, available for pre-order now.

In the past couple weeks, I’ve been observing some strange traffic. I’ve been getting a good number of hits to an old blog article of mine. Close to 1000 hits a day which is a lot for an old article that hasn’t been linked to in months.

The traffic has the following characteristics:

• No referrer.
• Different IPs.
• User agent is the same: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
• No other hits from those IPs (at least from the ones I’ve checked at random).

Seeing as how the article is Mac-centric and the user agent is for a Windows client, I suspect that these are automated hits and that whoever is hitting the article doesn’t care about its content. But if it’s some sort of bot attack, I don’t see the point of it.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out much more than that. So, yes, consider this a “Dear Lazyweb” post. If you have any ideas on what’s going on, please post here. Oh, and don’t ask me how, but I have eliminated the Illuminati from the list of suspects. UFOs/aliens are still fair game though.

Update (Oct. 16, 2007): Not sure what happened but it stopped, pretty much completely. It’s like someone flicked a switch. I still have no idea what that was all about but the fact that it stopped pretty suddenly implies there’s a central source to all this.

Also, something else I realized was that it seems as if those hits were hitting the article page but not any of the associated files (css, graphics, etc.). Very strange.

Again, any theories are welcome.

I have code that takes in a string and uses key-value coding to extract a value from an object. It works fine if you want to get a property of an object, but what about getting the object itself? Using nil or an empty string with -valueForKey: or -valueForKeyPath: causes it to call -valueForUndefinedKey: which, by default, throws an exception.

After some diddling around, I found that you can use the key @"self". Doing valueForKey:@"self" on an object returns that object. There’s no magic here. NSObject has a -self method which returns, crazily enough, itself. This is peculiar because on the surface, this method is useless. Anywhere where you can type [anObject self] you can type anObject instead. Where this method comes in handy is in cases where you dynamically call a method/selector, as in KVC, and you want to specify a method that is a short-circuit of sorts.

So, in short, all of the following are equivalent:

someObject
[someObject self]
[someObject valueForKey:@"self"]
[[[someObject valueForKey:@"self"] self] valueForKey:@"self"]

I’m sure someone can use the last one in some Objective-C obfuscation contest.

This can be filed under “Things that everybody probably already knows but you only just discovered recently”.

Both my old Powermac and my current Mac Pro shipped with the white “crumb catcher” keyboards. While the keyboards on Apple’s laptops as well as the newer aluminum keyboards have buttons for brightness, I always thought that you could not do so on the white keyboards. They have dedicated volume and eject buttons so I assumed that any brightness controls would be labeled as such. To adjust the brightness on my ACDs, I just used the buttons on the side of the screen itself. Not ideal as I prefer to not have to leave the keyboard when possible.

Thar be brightness controls on those keys!

Imagine my surprise when I overshot the “Home” key and hit F15. The screen brightness overlay appeared and the brightness went up by a notch. Sure enough, its neighbor to the left, F14, decreased the brightness. Now, while I’m happy that I can now adjust the brightness from the keyboard, I have to say I’m puzzled as to why Apple didn’t stick the brightness icons on the keys. I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about having F14 and F15 keys. The fact that I only discovered this now shows how often I press them. But, stick those “sun” icons on there and all of a sudden, those keys are useful. Of course, that leaves F16 out there all alone though I’m sure they could have figured out something for it as well. Now, the newer keyboards extend the function keys all the way over and all the hardware functions are doing double-duty with them. God knows my computing experience has been seriously blunted by the lack of an F19 key.

I get the feeling many of you know about this already and that I’m late to the party. If so, my apologies. But if this is news to you, then you might want to consider breaking out that sharpie and re-labeling your F14 and F15 keys.