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In the last years we’ve seen many SCM trying to replace SVN (which in turn replaced CVS in many places). Git, Mercurial are two examples of that. I never really looked into them as they mostly sounded like “SVN with this” or “SVN with that”. 

Then I discovered darcs and I never went back. Sure, XCode has no integration with darcs, but one can live without that. What made me switch from SVN to darcs is the “theory of patches” it is based on. It makes redundant most concepts like branches, revision and even tags are different (they are an empty patch depending on all patches that were in the repository already). This way it is really easy to branch (if XCode had any integration, it would make its snapshot feature incredibly powerful) and merge back. I also found it easy to handle conflicts (except on project.pbxproj files, be careful with those).

For Cocoa developers (like us) it is also really welcome that darcs puts only ONE directory (called _darcs) in the main project folder (unlike svn putting a .svn folder everywhere) so you are unlikely to mess things up, for example by copying nibs to localize them or things like that (which was plaguing me as PDFKey Pro is localized in many languages and I kept doing the same mistakes over and over with SVN).

Currently, a Darcs GUI for Mac OS X is in the works, is called Darcheology. It is already quite neat but is in dire need of contributors, so if you got some spare time, it is surely worth to take a look at it!

For the first time me and Karsten are collaborating at a new super-top-secret-no-dude-i-really-cannot-tell-you-about-it-seriously project.

As you may know, we don’t live in the same building, or not even the same country, so we had to setup some sort of protocols.

After the initial logistic problems, we have our darcs repository in good shape and learned to avoid conflicts.

Now the process mostly goes: one implements a feature, the other makes it work properly and viceversa. This leads to this kind of dialogs:

Today I was pointed at bla.st. I think is a really cool site, surely not the first to try this kind of marketing, but looks pretty much well done.

So, I felt the urge of creating a card there as well. The process was really easy, although their 30kb limit looks a bit too restrictive to me. Choosing categories is also a bit counter-intuitive, but then again I’m not really used with tags yet .

Advertising there is very inexpensive, currently in the software category a free submission will do! Hurry up while it lasts

Doing some tool that uses a NSTask to launch shell-scripts, I ran into a very annoying bug these days. The script were bash scripts and as soon as they were started, all output written by NSLog didn’t go to Xcode’s console, but rather only to console.log. This problem only seems to happen when using bash to execute the scripts, so switching to zsh did the trick and now NSLog works as charming as always. Thanks a lot to Michele for the hint with Zsh, I didn’t know that it uses the same syntax as bash and thus the only changes to the scripts were changes to the first line!

thanks a lot for the folks that found this out!

Karsten

Thanks to my trip to last weekend’s CocoaDevHouse in Munich at equinux I had some time in the train to work on CuteClips. Lots of bugs were fixed and new features were added. Thanks to Christian I also added the ability to select clips and paste them in the order they were selected. To select clips use shift-up/down, space or shift-click a clip.

I also noticed that I still used Arial for the numbers, now it’s done with Helvetica

Have fun with the new version!

Karsten

Welcome to the new briksoftware’s website! So, we were quite tired of the old design and decided to completely redesign it.

There are still some things we’d like to adjust but the theme is pretty much done and most importantly, it matches our cool t-shirts and business card!

Ah, it also matches our wallpaper!

Just some hours ago I got to Munich for tomorrow’s CocoaDevHouse. I guess it will be pretty interesting… there’ll be a talk about core data, maybe I finally understand it

On the way here in the train I had some time to work on CuteClips and fixed some bugs, one of them was a badly drawn bezierpath with rounded corners. It was like the edges were drawn with anti aliasing and the corners with very blurry anti aliasing.

I tried the bezierpath in a different view today and it looked pretty normal, just like one would expect it. Then i noticed that the edge was not directly on a pixel, but rather in between two pixels. The problem I has was simply that the bezierpath was clipped and thus the round corners looked much thicker than the edges. I inset the rect that was used to create the bezierpath and boom, it worked

Karsten

For those of you who may be in our same situation, switching from a managed shared hosting account to your own unmanaged server or VPS, I wrote a little how-to to help you were your resources are scarce and you just cannot use easy tools like cPanel.

This isn’t really “for dummies”, the tutorial doesn’t follow you step by step, but hey, you can get such a configuration to run even on a system with 128MB of RAM.

You can find the tutorial here.

Today I thought about a nice and easy way to inspect drag and drop objects or any Pasteboard in general. I ended up creating Drop Inspector, a very simple app that shows you the content of the General Pasteboard if you click on the drop area, or the content of the dragging pasteboard if you drag something on the drag area.

One big problem was that Cocoa (or OS X in general) doesn’t allow you to register a view for any draggin types. The app doesn’t even receive the mouse over event if you didn’t register for a certain type. But to solve this i simply added a text-input field where you can enter the identifier of this pasteboard type and click on “add type”.

Drop Inspector is listing all types that are registered in the pasteboard and if you select one it’ll show you the data of these types in a text-editor. That’s not the most useful thing to have, but better than nothing…copy and paste it into the hex-editor of your choice and see what comes out.

A much better way of processing this data is through FScript. So I added a simple FScript editor to the app, enter some code, hit Cmd-I and inspect the result. As most data on the clipboard is string data, the default is:

NSString alloc initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding.

I guess it should be pretty useful for anyone who wants to add drag and drop support to an application or who wants to extend it and needs to see what kind of data is available.

The app is released under MIT License and includes the source-code. The disc image can be loaded from: DropInspector.dmg

Karsten

PS: oh, and if there’s any icon artist out there with some freetime, willing to create a better icon for DropInspector, please do!

We just got a new home! Moving away from the (exceptionally great) Shared Hosting at A Small Orange, we are now on a VPS still at A Small Orange.

Transition was pretty smooth after I got everything setup, which wasn’t too pleasing to do with no cPanel and little RAM.On the sad not, I’m thinking about closing down codebeach.org.

It hasn’t seen much traffic lately, and apparently only me and Karsten are contributing.
It was an interesting experiment I guess but is time to end it. If someone wants to stop my hand from the delete button, please do it now or never

[EDIT] Probably codebeach is not going away after all