jerakeen.org

Utility to install rmagick on macos. Might be useful if I ever want to try using the system ruby for development.

http://www.simplisticcomplexity.com/2008/06/06/jeez-peopl...

Third Edition. Yay.

http://flickr.com/photos/jerakeen/2572118813

http://flickr.com/photos/jerakeen/2451545731

Shelf 0.0.13 is available, though it’ll auto-update itself if you let it. Not a lot in this one, the most interesting thing for me is that Dopplr support is back in and works a lot better - there’s now a button to click that’ll get you a token, for instance. I’ve also squashed various crashes for cases where data was bad.

Full changelog for this version here.

oooh, pretty. When I have a free moment I must knock up something like this for subversion

http://github.com/Caged/gitnub/wikis

Another week, another Shelf release - this one is 0.0.12 - read the release notes or download the binary.

Loads of stuff in this one, but muttley may like the fact that you can now turn off the background poller and have Shelf look for context only when you hit a global shortcut key. This will also make life nicer for people with smaller screens who don’t want this widow popping to the foreground every time it can figure out who you’re looking at.

Other than that, there are lots of improvements. Shelf should be faster and make less gratuitous network requests. Feed display is prettier, and I make an effort to display recently updated feeds at the top, rather than in random order.

So, I have a new release of Shelf, having finally been inspired to put a bit of effort into the scary refactorings I was putting off. It’s internally much better than the last one, though I still have places I can take it. Feature-wise, it’s only a little better, though. Feeds look nicer. It should be fast, and caches the contents of remote feeds better, so it’ll thrash the network less.

The big thing is the Google Social Graph integration. Disabled by default, because it’s a privacy nightmare, I can ask Google who the current page in our web browser belongs to, to found out a person to display in Shelf. Once I’ve got a person, I can also ask Google what other URLs they advertise about themselves, so you no longer have to stuff dozens of URLs into your Address Book cards just to see interesting things about people. Looking at Brad’s homepage is a good torture test..

I’m alwo working towards making Simon happier, with a couple of preferences determining how the window should be displayed. It’s not all the way there yet, but I’m moving..

Get the full release notes here.

These version numbers are just jumping around randomly now. Well, ok, they’re not, but not every version escapes to the world. Anyway, download the new Shelf - this one has an icon! And it now includes Sparkle, so it’ll update itself automatically from now on - you can stop visiting my blog every 10 minutes to see if I’ve released a new version now.

Incidentally, Sparkle is <i>stupidly</i> easy to install - everyone should use it. It’s awesome.

I’m going to start keeping a proper ChangeLog now, because I have no idea what’s in this version. Better cacheing? I think it’ll also use AddressBook.app as a source of Clues, so if you’re having trouble getting the app to do anything, just open Address Book and look at a card - you’re guaranteed to see something.

Ruby turned out to be a bit of a pain for Shelf - I needed many external libraries and the Ruby bridge does a fairly bad job of packaging them all. I’ve ported the thing to Python now and it seems better - in fact, it’s better enough that I can actually produce a binary! Check out the downloadable action! - MacOS 10.5 only, and this is very unlikely to change. Deal with it.

It’ll pull context from Safari, NetNewsWire, Mail.app, Adium and Twitterific. Adding new apps is easy, I just haven’t yet. It’ll display only the person’s name, email addresses, and street address. And there will be errors if the street address is incomplete. It’s a PROOF OF CONCEPT. Jeez. Quit whining. There is code to fetch the recent feeds of their pages, but it’s disabled because the app blocks while it’s doing it, making it practically unusable.

Rather than me updating this page all the time, just go to the Shelf project page and get the most recent binary from there.

I really miss Dashboard. It was an effort to display some context around whatever person you were interacting with at any given moment - look at an email from Paul, or open an IM chat with him and you’d see things that he’d blogged or uploaded to Flickr recently. Genius. From the screenshots, it looks practically magic, tying into incoming SMS messages, IM conversations, the RSS feed reader, etc.

Alas, I never had a fully working Dashboard setup locally, mostly because applications had to actively participate in the process - they sent things called ‘cluepackets’ to the dashboard application containing hints about the current context. Because of this design, every app involved needed its source code patched and a recompile. This was a complete pain. Obviously, had everything gone to plan, the patches would have been merged and everyone would have been happy. I presume that Dashboard failed because the bootstrapping process was so hard that no-one used it.

Anyway, inspired by both Dashboard and Aaron‘s obsession with the address book, I’ve had a stab at doing it again, but worse.

Shelf

Shelf will look at the current foreground application, and try to figure out if what you’re looking at corresponds to a person in your Address Book. Then it’ll tell you things about them.

Update 2008/01/08: I have downloadable versions of Shelf now. Go to the project page and download one.

It’s for MacOS. Because on MacOS, I have OSA - I can interrogate most (well-written) applications about their state in a beautiful, language-agnostic and fast manner. I can ask Mail.app for the email address of the current mail. I can ask Safari what the URL of the foreground window is. I can ask Adium for the account details of the current chat. I can ask NetNewsWire for the homepage URL of the current subscription. And I can ask the system what app is in the foreground. I can also interrogate the system address book via the Cocoa bindings for same and find out what users have got that email address, or URL, or AIM screen name. And then I can take all the other information about them in their address book entry, and figure out some context. Oh, and the thing’s written in Ruby, because the Ruby scripting bridge is a thing of serious beauty and should be played with by everyone.

Good thing

So, advantages. I don’t have the bootstrapping problem, because most MacOS applications already have enough of a scripting interface that I can extract information from them. Firefox is proving to be a serious problem, alas, but I’ve hit no other apps I can’t get something useful out of.

Once I have an Addressbook record as context, I can update the interface with a picture of the person and their name/company (direct from the address book, so easy). As a ‘will this work?’ experiment, I’m parsing every referenced URL in the address book card for RSS feeds, and displaying those as context. And (because I work there) I have special-case Dopplr support that tells me where the person is in the world and where they’re going next. This means that when someone IMs me, a window pops up and tells me where they are, when they’re back, and what they’ve blogged recently. Awesome.

The system address book is great - it has multiple email address and URLs for people, so I’m indicating things like Dopplr username by just putting the url to my traveller page in my address book entry. I can parse the username out later and use it to call the API with. This has the advantage that if I visit my Dopplr page in Safari, hey, wow, that URL is in the address book, and it knows that it’s me again. Flickr is the next obvious choice for special-casing, but the principle extends to anything.

Bad thing

Disadvantages. Firstly, urgh, I’m polling. Every 2 seconds, I ask the system for the foreground application, then ask that application (if I know how) for context. This is probably a little heavy (is it? I’m guessing..). Secondly, I have to do explicit work for every app out there. The huge advantages of Dashboard’s cluepacket approach over mine were that packets were pushed instantly on a change of context, and that a new application was responsible for sending its own cluepackets.

Actually, this is easy. My app should have a ‘change context’ OSA method that other applications can call. Smart apps can tell me when their context changes, and I’ll just poll everyone else. Once I’ve taken over the world, everyone will be pushing messages to me, and I can deprecate the poll interface. Genius.

Recently, most of the crazy apps I’ve put here have been labelled as ‘proof of concept’. This one is different. This one probably won’t even build on your computer. I’m putting things up here as a was of musing about technique. For instance, Dashboard had a far better design than this app. It had a nice pipeline thing going for it, whereas I just have a class per foreground application, this class must produce an Address Book record, then I just interrogate every context producer for information and display it. This is silly - if I’m looking at Paul’s Flickr photos page, I don’t need my app showing me the thumbnails again, I might be much more interested in where he is right now. Hell, in a perfect world, it would work out the dates of the photos I’m looking at, and show me where he was at that time.

Future

Clever things I could (and want to) do:

• If the foreground URL doesn’t belong to a user, look for hcard markup in the source HTML and try to derive a person from that. Right now, for instance, I’ll only recognise your Flickr page as belonging to you if it’s one of the URLs against your address book card. But Flickr pages are marked up with enough hcard that I should be just able to figure it out.

• More intelligence around context - as above, if I’m looking at a blog of a friend, I want to see other things, not their blog again.

• Remembering connections - if I figure out a local person from a Flickr page via hcard markup rather than an Address Book URL, why not remember their Flickr username and display their photos when they email me?

Many of these features are difficult, mostly because of my core design right now - I derive an Address Book entry from the current application, then derive context from that entry. This hampers cleverness somewhat - I really need to pass around a lot more information about how I derived this person, and keep a local cache of conclusions about them. Maybe the person isn’t in my address book - I get email from people I don’t know! But their email address might correspond to a Gravatar so I could show a picture of them. Maybe the mail has some URLs in the .sig and I could find their blog. Maybe they’ve commented on my blog in the past and I’d like links to the comments. Likewise, if I find, via hcard in the source of a page, that a page is about someone I know, should I update Address Book and add URLs for them? Probably not a good idea. So I need a local store of connections as well.

Now what?

I don’t know. It’s very tempting to rewrite the thing in Python before it gets any more complex. Partially this is because the Ruby feedparser dependencies are a bugger, but mostly it’s because I don’t want my python sk1llz to atrophy down to nothing. Recently everything I do is in Ruby, and I don’t like that. Shelf also desperately needs some work done to make it asynchronous, and cache things - when I look at an email right now, it’ll hang for 5 minutes while it goes off and fetches 20 RSS feeds, every time I change the person I’m looking at. Not exactly pleasant. But the ‘find out about a person’ is really just a trivial example of the sort of things you can do once you know who they are. The ‘derive context from current machine state’ side of things is much more interesting.

Via mark, quicklook plugin for zip files

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/t_trace/20071125/p2

aaah, lovely. I hate how loud the starup bong is.

http://www.silvermac.com/2006/mac-os-x-start-up-sound-vol...

interesting stuff about font scaling. Personally, I’ve always felt that macos fonts looked nicer than linux fonts. Now I understand it, maybe I can fix this. For my own personal perception, anyway..

http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html

I’m on a bizarre retro-quake thing at the moment.

http://ioquake3.org/

Menubar utility that’ll tell you which of the available wireless networks are closed/open. Why doesn’t the built-in wireless menu do this? Free, too. Yay.

http://coconut-flavour.com/coconutwifi/

Apps should copy themselves off disk images if run from a disk image. Very true. I should make all my apps do this, it should be easy. [update later: wait, no. One of the comments has it right. Disk images suck - ship .zip files with .apps in them]

http://www.noodlesoft.com/blog/2007/04/15/a-modest-propos...

DjangoKit is a framework that will take a Django application, and turn it into a stand-alone MacOS application with a local database and media files. It started as more of a thought experiment than an effort at producing a real application, but I have it working, and you can package perfectly usable stand-alone applications with it.

DjangoKit is currently hosted in a Google Code repository, so go there for downloads and source.

This utility is great and I could not live without it.

http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/2007/02/unicodechecker_112

aaah, huge scary security worries.

http://forum.parallels.com/thread8127.html

Universal SSHKeychain binary. Yay.

http://collectivity.goof.com/articles/2006/04/08/sshkeych...

GAAAAAAAHHHH. Installing TeX is as hard as USING it.

http://www.mecheng.adelaide.edu.au/~will/texstart/

cocoalicious stopped working in the WORST POSSIBLE WAY - it looked like it was posting, but wasn’t really. Bah. Mark recommends this.

http://codesorcery.net/pukka

If you’ve ever edited files over samba, or on a fat partition, using a mac, you’ll know that it scatters annoying ._foo.txt files all over the place when you save things. These files are the system’s way of compensating for these filesystems not supporting ‘real’ resource forks, and they’re a complete pain. I feel this pain especially when I’m trying to see what’s changed in a subversion checkout using svn st, and it produces 30 lines of ? ._foo.pl complaints.

Fortunately, subversion allows you to ignore this stuff. Edit the file ~/.subversion/config (which is created the first time you use the subversion client), and search for the ‘miscellany’ section. Uncomment the line [miscellany] if it’s not already, and also uncomment the line beginning global-ignores. This line is a list of glob patterns for files that should be ignored when doing a svn st, or svn add (if you svn add on a folder, it won’t add any backup files in the folder, for instance). Add the pattern ._* to the end of it, and your resource fork woes are over…

PHP5 for MacOS, including universal binaries

http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/php/

A useful heap of python packages for macos

http://pythonmac.org/packages/py24-fat/index.html

things to play with when I get back to a desk that has a mac on it.

http://nodebox.net/

On the possibility of garbage collection in MacOS. Having to do my own memory management always put me off Objective C, but frankly given the existence of high-level bindings like pyobj, I don’t see me ever using this.

http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/5/6/3868

A cocoa scratchpad for text-based notes storage.

Blotter is a scratchpad / notepad application I threw together so that I’d have somewhere to keep notes. It stores rich text, objects, etc, etc, still needs lots of features, but I use it as dogfood and quite like it. It requires Mac OS 10.4 - sorry.

Subversion

I develop in subversion. Check the source out here. The source requires XCode 2.1 to build (for versions > 0.9 - earlier versions are PyObjC based).

I suggest you use one of the releases, though.

I discovered Cocoa bindings and verily, they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Not that I’m very fond of sliced bread.

I’ve re-written Blotter from the ground up to take advantage of them - it’s much nicer and more reliable now, although I totally changed the back-end format, so anyone actually using it and wanting to upgrade is in for a shock. I don’t think anyone is, though. I mostly wrote it because I saw xPad and didn’t really want to pay for something that seemed so trivial..

Anyway, Blotter 0.7 release - it’s usable, although unhelpful the first time you start it. I use this app constantly, myself, so I like to think it’s reliable. I’ve certainly never lost data to it. (I’m doomed now, of course.)

Update (about an hour later)

Curses, 0.7.1, with some small fixes.

Finally, we have a public release of Flame. Getting this out the door has taken a while, but I’m very happy with it’s current state, so let’s see what the rest of the world thinks.. I have a project page here but the ‘real’ app page for linking is the husk.org one.