Distracted Attention

Pareto principle at work

Why does the final 20% of a project take 80% of your time?

Posted by Nick | July 30, 2008 | Filed under News

More xcode build scripting

Tinkered around with the appcast code from here and no doubt made it messier than the original. I’ve added two new files to xcode-build-scripts repository, appcast.rb and updateAppcastVersionInfo.rb. I’ve also updated postBuild.sh to make use of it.
Next step to add a push script to upload the appcast and zipfile to my host.
To Capistrano / Vlad [...]

Posted by Nick | July 30, 2008 | Filed under Cocoa

Icons, Fonts and Themes Linkdump

Starting from Inspiredology Flickr Group Showcase post at Inspiredology, I’ve had a heady whirlwhind of icons, fonts and themes. It’s one of those days where every link seems to be worth bookmarking. And while we’re on the subject of bookmarking, thank you del.icio.us, for being one of those web apps I couldn’t live without. Yahoo [...]

Posted by Nick | July 29, 2008 | Filed under Design

Script your Sparkle with Ruby

Chris Bailey has written some ruby code to automate appcast creation:
Creating Sparkle Appcast via Rake Tasks
I’ll be tinkering with his script to do the same from Xcode.

Posted by Nick | July 28, 2008 | Filed under Cocoa

Xcode Build Scripts - GitHub Repo Created

Later today I’ll be uploading the scripts referenced here to my GitHub repository: xcode-build-scripts.

Posted by Nick | July 28, 2008 | Filed under Cocoa

Core Data and Memory

After reading some excellent tips and advice on the Cocoa With Love blog and the Apple document Core Data Programming Guide: Efficiently Importing Data, I spent some time tweaking my import routines.
The lessons learned paid off, with vastly improved import times, mainly from splitting NSManagedObject creation and relationship management apart. It also helped me to [...]

Posted by Nick | July 24, 2008 | Filed under Cocoa

Git Build Numbers for your Project

Had an idea earlier today to use script to generate incremental build numbers when compiling my Xcode projects. By default, Git uses hashes which resemble 02af6c6986c0973a38acb1a1dc392012840067c7, which is not human-friendly.
Dusted off my Programming Ruby book and put together the following:

Posted by Nick | July 21, 2008 | Filed under Cocoa, Design, Featured

Out with Bloglines, in with Google Reader

Bloglines has served me faithfully for the last few years. Alas it’s iPhone support, specifically keep-as-new, and collapsable folders isn’t up to par. So I’ve just exported my subscriptions (thank you open formats) and imported them into Google Reader.
In the process I lose my currently “kept as new” items from Bloglines (which I can always [...]

Posted by Nick | July 21, 2008 | Filed under Web

After a few more adjustments…

This is how Pepper is looking now:

Took some cues from iLife suite (toolbar moved to bottom bar).

Posted by Nick | July 20, 2008 | Filed under Cocoa

Simplicity wins over complexity again

It’s nice when a solution to a problem involves culling rather than adding code…

Posted by Nick | July 19, 2008 | Filed under Cocoa