top products

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 😉

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.

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

I’m using Cmd-Tab to cycle through my apps really often…in fact my left hand always sits on the keyboard and Cmd-Tab and Cmd-< is probably one of the most shortcuts used here to cycle through apps and windows. I don’t know why I just hit the option key while releasing the Cmd-Tab, but the result was pretty cool: It’s just like clicking the application’s icon in the dock!

I always wondered why apps just activate when you Cmd-Tab to them, but activating them in the dock always works a little bit different: in Mail it opens the main window if no window is open; in Safari it opens a new window if none is open. So pressing the option key when you want to release Cmd-Tab also does this.

The only downside is: it’s a bit tricky to do actually, especially as you can’t hold down option to activate the application cycling.

nice hidden modifier 😉

Karsten

I ran into this problem twice now but I finally found a way of drawing a JPG which has a different pixel-size than the NSImage that represents it.

So I had an NSImage that printed like this:

NSImage 0x250390 Size={601.5, 451.5} Reps=(
		NSBitmapImageRep 0x250df0 Size={601.5, 451.5} ColorSpace=NSCalibratedRGBColorSpace 
		BPS=8 BPP=24 Pixels=802x602 Alpha=NO Planar=NO Format=0
    )

Please notice the size of {601.5, 451.5}! First I was like WTF‽ Looking for a solution I found out that the bitmap representation responds to pixelsWide and pixelsHigh, so I could use this to calculate the correct size of the image. The next problem I needed to solve was how to tell the image that it should use the correct pixel size for drawing. I tried with drawInRect:fromRect:composite:fraction to no avail.

The solution to all this mess is as simple as it could be: just set the NSImage’s size to the pixel size and you’re done!

    NSImageRep* rep = [image bestRepresentationForDevice:nil];
    NSSize imgSize = NSMakeSize([rep pixelsWide],[rep pixelsHigh]);
    [image setSize:imgSize];

These three simple lines can save a lot of trouble, especially if you don’t know about these resolution information that NSImage seems to take care of.

So thanks to this little snippet Camouflage should render wallpapers pretty much exactly as Apple does in Finder.

Karsten

I just updated Camouflage and CuteClips. Both use a newer version of BSHotKey now. The new version should be on CodeBeach.org already. You may now specify a default hotkey when initializing the BSHotKeyManager. The code that is needed for this specification can be obtained by simply running the Test-Application that ships with BSHotKey. Just change the hotkey and see the message-send in the log-area of the window.

One of the new features of CuteClips is the integration of QuickLook in MacOS X 10.5. Thanks to Cocoa it’s possible to use the framework that is available only in 10.5 without linking to it. Linking the framework will cause your app to crash if the framework can’t be found (like in 10.4). But fortunately frameworks are just bundles with a bit of a different structure, but still they’re loadable code. That means you may just initialize a NSBundle with the path to the framework and then load the bundle. Simple, eh? 😉

Just a little status update from my side.

I’ll be at this years Macelodeon-Lan (a lan for mac-gamers here in germany) from today till Sunday, so don’t worry if you won’t receive an answer to your mails as fast as usual, I guess I’ll be offline there.

However, there’s a new version of Camouflage approaching, I just have to fix a small bug that happens in 10.5 when a screen is attached to the notebook.

I’m sure I’ll also have some time to work on CuteClips during the lan, so maybe there’s a new beta available next week as well 🙂

Have a nice weekend everyone

Karsten