Here’s a cute little Alfred extension I put together today that uploads a file to a TestFlight team for you, after prompting for build notes.
You’ll wanna edit the extension to put in your API key and Team ID, then just select a file in Alfred, type ‘testflight’ (or an abbreviation thereof) and enter, then enter a build summary, and off it goes. Result will appear in Growl.
Upload to TestFlight.alfredextension.zip
I noticed that WordPress these days uses a shortcode to define image captions, of the form:
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="630" caption="Image title goes here"]<img src="http://domain.com/imgpath/../image.jpg" width="630" height="420" />[/caption]
I’ve recently redone our blog template at Technomadics, and while setting up the new preview template in MarsEdit, thought I’d take a stab at implementing support for captions, too, via some javascript in the template.
I was successful! Here’s how I did it:
Added the following to the “head” section:
<script type="text/javascript"> var prior_content; function watch_for_changes() { var check = function() { var elt = document.getElementById('content'); if ( elt.innerHTML != prior_content ) { elt.innerHTML = apply_filters(elt.innerHTML); prior_content = elt.innerHTML; } setTimeout(check, 100); }; setTimeout(check, 100); } function apply_shortcode(source, name, callback) { return source.replace(new RegExp('\\[' + name + '\\s*([^\\]]*)\\]((.|[\s\n])*?)\\[/' + name + '\\]', 'g'), function(match, paramString, content) { params = new Object(); reg = /([a-z]+)="((:?="[^"]+"|[^"])*)"/gi; while ( (match = reg.exec(paramString)) != null ) { params[match[1]] = match[2]; } return callback(params, content); }); } function apply_filters(html) { html = apply_shortcode(html, "caption", function(args, content) { return '<div '+ 'class="wp-caption ' + (typeof(args.align) != 'undefined' ? args.align : '') + '" '+ 'style="width: ' + args.width + 'px;">' + content + '<p class="wp-caption-text">' + args.caption + '</p></div>'; }); return html; } </script>
…changed to ‘body’ tag to…
<body onload="watch_for_changes();">
…And wrapped a div around the main “#body#, #extended#” content with an id of content:
<div id="content"> #body# #extended# </div>
Basically, it polls the content area for changes, and when triggered, runs it though a filter. The above is extensible, and by adding additional “apply_shortcode” calls from “apply_filters“, more shortcodes can be simulated.
‘symbolicatecrash’ is the Developer Tools utility which replaces all those meaningless addresses from crash logs with actual symbol names and source code references. It lives at some obscure folder within /Developer – use find to dig it up and symlink it into /usr/local/bin if you wanna use it conveniently from the command line.
Anyway, after plenty of frustration, I noticed some chatter about the damn thing being busted in Xcode 4. Figures!
There’s an alternate third party version on GitHub, but this didn’t really help me – I still got inscrutable errors, so I took a look at the original.
The version that comes with Xcode 4 appears to have some problems distinguishing, say, an iPhone Simulator build of the app from a native build sitting in the Archives folder. I’d just see an error about otool and some binary living in the iPhone Simulator folder.
Digging into the errant symbolicatecrash source, I noticed that the code that finds the executable path tests each candidate using otool, but doesn’t seem to be able to comprehend the output from otool caused by running it on the wrong architecture.
So, replacing the rather unhelpful ‘die’ statement on line 323:
die "Can't understand the output from otool ($TEST_uuid -> '$otool -arch $arch -l $path')";
With a “No, it ain’t this executable” response:
return 0;
…solves the problem immediately. Now I can drag crash logs straight into the Organizer in Xcode, and it’ll symbolicate correctly.
Sometimes there’s just one tiny snippet of Cocoa code that you want to test — maybe to find out the output of NSDateFormatter for various cases, testing out some text replacement routine, or testing out some image drawing code.
It’s often too much trouble to create a new XCode project and set up the framework to do one simple test, which is why I put together this little shell script that lets you run Cocoa code from the command line:
$ runcocoa 'NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init] autorelease]; [formatter setDateFormat:@"d MMM, h:mm a"]; NSLog(@"%@", [formatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]]);'
2011-02-23 20:02:10.313 runcocoa-output[28025:903] 23 Feb, 8:02 PM
You have full access to all Cocoa libraries, and in iOS mode, access to most iOS stuff too, straight from the command line.
Update: This is now available as a GitHub project Read More
So, Safari’s resume facility is just awful — it’ll randomly restart downloads from the beginning, clobbering anything that’s already been downloaded, and the resume button will frequently disappear entirely and mysteriously from the downloads window. And if the session has expired, it’ll cause all kinds of havoc.
Anyone downloading the gazillion-gb iOS/Mac SDK + XCode on a slow and/or expensive connection will know the sheer fisticuffs-inspiring irritation this creates — speaking personally, living on a mobile broadband connection that’s usually changed at £3 per gig and often runs about as fast as I could send the data via carrier pigeon, this usually makes me want to storm Cupertino with a pitchfork.
Okay, so I could probably use Firefox or something else, but instead I figured I’d whip up* a shell script that lets me use my favoured long-haul download tool – curl. And in case there were any other sufferers of insanely-priced broadband and Safari’s antisocial behaviour, I thought I’d share it.
It’ll ask for your Apple ID and password, and store it in the keychain for you, and it’ll resume from the current working directory.
Chuck it somewhere like /usr/local/bin, make sure it’s executable (chmod +x /usr/local/bin/adc_download.sh) and call it from Terminal like:
adc_download.sh https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/download.action?path=/Developer_Tools/xcode_4_gm_seed/xcode_4_gm_seed_.dmg
If you’ve already started the download in Safari, just grab the partially-downloaded file from within the .download package Safari creates.
Here ’tis:
Update: Now includes team support, thanks to Christopher Bowns — see the comments at the top of the script for usage instructions.
P.S. I’d be interested to see how incremental updates fare when transferred from an intermediate server with rsync. It’s rather bizarre that Apple reissue the whole 3.x gb SDK with each update, rather than offering a ‘patch’ (I guess Apple lives blithely in the world of cheap bandwidth!), and it makes me wonder whether there’d be sufficient correlation between versions to save some bandwidth by avoiding transferring the similarities…
* read: spend hours on, as is my way.
The UNIX shell provides a host of extremely useful utilities for modifying text. This OS X Automator service makes all of them available for filtering text in all OS X applications.
This can be handy for performing quick operations, like replacing text with regular expressions, sorting lists or swapping fields around.
When triggered, the service requests a command to use for filtering, then runs the command and replaces the selected text with the result.
Some sample operations:
Put it in Library/Services, and it should appear in the ‘Services’ menu.
F-Script, the Cocoa-based scripting environment, now provides some great tools for exploring Core Data databases.
I couldn’t figure out how to easily open up my databases, other than manually creating a managed object model, then a persistent store coordinator, then a managed object context on the console. I couldn’t find any existing tools, and I wanted a quick workflow for opening up my databases, so I put together a script that prompts for the application bundle or .xcdatamodel(d) data model file, then prompts for the XML (.xml), binary (.binary) or SQLite (.sql or anything else) database file, and opens up the inspector.
I wrote it as an Applescript that just calls upon F-Script to evaluate the script, and saved it in an application bundle so I can pull it up quickly.
Here it is:
It just needs the F-Script app to be available.
Upon opening, the managed object context is available on the console as “context“. So, aside from using F-Script’s object browser, you can also do things like:
> request := (NSFetchRequest alloc) init > request setEntity:(NSEntityDescription entityForName:'MyEntity' inManagedObjectContext:context) > request setPredicate:(NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:'type = 3') > result := context executeFetchRequest:request error:nil > result _PFArray {<nsmanagedobject: 0x2006cf740> (entity: MyEntity; id: 0x20064c9e0 <x -coredata://BAC82A67-CC41-48C2-8A96-693B67A501D6/MyEntity/p1> ; data: <fault>), <nsmanagedobject: 0x2006bdc80> (entity: MyEntity; id: 0x20064c9c0 <x -coredata://BAC82A67-CC41-48C2-8A96-693B67A501D6/MyEntity/p2> ; data: <fault>), <nsmanagedobject: 0x2006bc680> (entity: MyEntity; id: 0x200651180 <x -coredata://BAC82A67-CC41-48C2-8A96-693B67A501D6/MyEntity/p3> ; data: <fault>) ... </fault></x></nsmanagedobject:></fault></x></nsmanagedobject:></fault></x></nsmanagedobject:>
Update: Now has better error reporting, and the option to load classes from a bundle.
For those interested, here’s the original F-Script: Read More
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I ♥ Alfred: Code execution extensions
Here’re two extensions I use to run PHP code (one which just executes it and shows the result in Growl, and one which copies the result to the clipboard), and an extension that runs a snippet of C code. Of course, it wouldn’t take much to make extensions for many other languages, too.
Execute PHP Code.alfredextension
Execute PHP Code, Copy Result.alfredextension
Run C code.alfredextension