A Tasty Pixel » Development

Links for March 6th through March 16th

Links for March 6th through March 16th:

CSS Code Snippets : 15 Wicked Tricks Some useful CSS tricks; of particular interest: cross-platform min-height, a trick to clear floats (without needing a 'clearing' div), and page breaks
45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience Here are over 45 impressive jQuery plug-ins and techniques that have been recently created and that could make the development of your next website an easier and more interesting experience than the last.
How to Create a Disk Image Installer for Apple Mac OS X
Cocoa: Sidebar with Badges, Take 2 'Source list'-esque sidebar with support for badges
soultravelers3 A family of three from Santa Cruz, California on an epic odyssey: open-ended, years long slow trip around the world as a family adventure, unschool, spiritual journey and lifestyle.

Podcast interview with Dan Grigsby of Mobile Orchard on Loopy’s development

Last Thursday I did an interview with Dan Grigsby from Mobile Orchard; the interview is now online.

Highlights from this interview include:

From UIView to OpenGL: the seven different implementations it took to finalize its unique — and Best App Ever award-nominated — UI.

From audio-queues to Remote IO: the four different architectural approaches he tried before finalizing audio subsystems.

The travails of trying to implement echo cancelation.

The business of making a living off of a $10 app

Listen to it here, or subscribe in iTunes (30 min.)

Understanding error codes

Just in case there’s someone else that didn’t know this, when one gets an error code from one of the iPhone/OS X SDKs with no other information available, it can usually be looked up in the MacErrors.h header. Just open a terminal, type:

open -h MacErrors.h

Then do a search for your error code and you’ll hopefully find a corresponding macro name that gives some indication of what went wrong.

Failing that, if you have an inkling of where the error occurred (eg. the AudioToolbox framework), then you can often find the error defined within the framework’s headers:

$ grep -r '10863' /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS2.1.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/AudioToolbox.framework/ /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS2.1.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/AudioToolbox.framework/Headers/AUGraph.h: kAUGraphErr_CannotDoInCurrentContext = -10863,

That was, type in Terminal grep -r 'the error code', then drag the framework straight from XCode into the Terminal, where the path will be inserted.

Links for February 10th through February 27th

Links for February 10th through February 27th:

TinEye Reverse Image Search TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.
Traffic Shaping in Mac OS X | Mac Geekery "…Create several pipes that have a set bandwidth and other properties for all packets that get filed into them; you then add queues to those pipes that determine what priority certain requests will get in that pipe; then you add actual firewall rules to identify packets and file them into queues."
Brandon Walkin » Introducing BWToolkit BWToolkit is a BSD licensed plugin for Interface Builder 3 that contains commonly used UI elements and other useful objects. Using these objects is as simple as dragging them from the library to your canvas or document window. In particular, "No Code" preferences window and tabbed sheets.
Aussie iPhone app developers and the IRS? Discussion about tax details for Australian iPhone developers. It appears the advice from Apple on the tax form is incorrect for sales on the App Store.
google-toolbox-for-mac – How to do iPhone unit testing This is a quick tutorial on doing iPhone unit testing using the facilities in the Google Toolbox For Mac

Developing Loopy, Part 2: Implementation

This is part 2 of a series following the development of Loopy, my iPhone app.

In part 1, I wrote about Loopy’s interface. Part 2 will be more technical, and will cover some challenges encountered during the evolution of Loopy from concept and mockup to working software. Or, more specifically, the stupid things I did along the way.

Links for January 31st through February 9th

Links for January 31st through February 9th:

Lost and Taken Free stock textures for your graphic design and photography projects
NSCollection Extensions Weird and wonderful extensions to key/value coding ([myRecordCollection valueForKeyPath:
@"[collect].{artist like 'Tom Waits'}.<NSUnarchiveFromDataTransformerName>.albumCoverImageData"])
Free Fonts Generator Make Your Own Handwriting Font
Grayson’s pluginmanager A series of classes that provides support for a vast number of scripting languages as well as standard Cocoa bundles
Deezer Listen to full songs online: Good for getting a preview of albums, much better than iTunes' silly 30 second snippets

Developing Loopy, Part 1: Interface

Loopy is my first iPhone app, a loop-based performance/musical scratchpad app based on looping audio equipment and inspired by, equally, the fantastic and free “Freewheeling” application, and an a capella performance by Imogen Heap.

It’s development was a whirlwind of obsessive coding, near-vertical learning curves, impatience, excitement and occasional burnout and writers block.

I thought I’d share some facts and lessons learned from the process, in a several-part article. For part 1, read on.

Links for December 29th through January 28th

Links for December 29th through January 28th:

Dramatic Gritty Effect In this tutorial we’re going to show you how to add a dramatic, gritty, bronzed effect to your images.
Propel Propel is an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) framework for PHP5. It allows you to access your database using a set of objects, providing a simple API for storing and retrieving data.
The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time Passwords to try when I desperately need to get onto a locked Wifi network for some reason. Don’t tell anybody.
Foreign Exchange Rates (FOREX) XML Feed or CSV Feed Free for commercial or non-commercial use, updated daily, XML/CSV format
10 Places To Publicize Your iPhone App A list of iPhone App review/gallery sites