BrT

For some time I have been using this technique (with the variation mentioned in my comment: use the application also as the stack overlay icon) to clean my Downloads stack in the OSX dock. The only problem with using an Automator app is that it is quite slow, so I have replaced it with a [...]

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I spent a few minutes today trying to figure out why, when setting a value to zero in an NSTableView, the number formatter I had associated with that column (to add a percentage sign to each number) was not being applied. Eventually, I realized that zero is a special case for NSNumberFormatter, and by default [...]

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I get most of my desktop background pictures from either vladstudio or the NASA Image of the Day site, both excellent sources of fantastic images. To make it easier to fetch a particular image, I have created two Automator workflows, which you can download here:
Get image from Vladstudio.zip
Get image from NASA image of the day.zip
To [...]

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Today I learned how to add support for undo/redo operations using NSUndoManager. This was completely new to me, and I was surprised at how cleverly done it is – essentially, for every operation that you want to undo, you provide the “inverse” operation, and NSUndoManager takes care of keeping them in appropriate stacks for undo/redo, [...]

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After a lot of searching (and trying iMovie) for how to convert an AVI video file to flash (.flv) format, I found ffmpegX, a nice tool that does all the hard work, invoking other tools in the backend as needed.
Posted by email from zzamboni’s posterous

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I learned today the term designated initializer:

When a class has multiple initializers, the designated initializer is the one that actually does the work, normally the one with the most parameters. All other initializers call the designated one, providing different amounts of default parameter values.

I was aware of the concept – many classes have [...]

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Welcome to the first installment of “What I learned today about Cocoa” (WILTAC).
I have recently started reading Aaron Hillegass’ excellent Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, third edition, with the intention of brushing up my very lacking Cocoa skills (all of them learned empirically by looking at other people’s code and reading the documentation). To [...]

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