A very comprehensive overview of the Cocoa text system and how to customize it:
http://hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html
I have had to figure out a lot of this myself when developing JobTimer X (an in-house time keeping tool for Buttgereit und Heidenreich) and Kaleidotype. But this is also the fun in programming – bending the system to your needs.
After about 600 shot images I noticed a couple of things that I had been handling wrongly in my photo workflow until now. The following is a detailed description of my solution to these problems, including code excerpts. I hope that this will be useful to some of my readers, be it for photo editing or other areas.
Although I try to keep the daily flood of information coming at me in check by avoiding to subscribe to podcasts, there are some that do interest me. One of them is CocoaRadio, which features occasional interviews with Mac programmers. In the episode from August 1, 2005, Fraser Speirs made a couple of statements that express my own motivation to work with Mac OS X and to develop software for it quite well:
OS X is a platform where people tend to craft their own tools.
His desire is to create tools for other people with a focus on user interaction and interface design – basically to make people happy. If more programmers would make this a top priority, “ordinary” computer users would be spared much stress …
Here are some links that I especially noticed today: Two very useful sources for Cocoa programmers having technical questions, cocoabuilder.com and cocoadev.com; and 43folders.com, a website on productivity, time management and much more.
Who or what in the world is Dumbarton? Well, in the real world it is the name of a bridge in the San Francisco area. In the computer world, it is a “bridge” between two programming languages: Objective-C, used by Apple, and C#, used by Microsoft. In the words of Allan Hsu, one of the creators of Dumbarton:
We call the ObjC<->C# bridging framework Dumbarton, named after the bridge that spans the San Francisco Bay between Fremont and Menlo Park. Our reasoning: both bridges are somewhat unpleasant to cross, but they get you where you want to go.
Why is this of interest to me? Well, I’m thinking about the right way to port Kaleidotype over to Windows, and this sounds like a great way to have a platform-independent back-end in C# (actually, Mono, a platform-independent implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework) without sacrificing the great user-interface capabilities of Apple’s Cocoa frameworks written in Objective-C, at least for the Mac version. However, I’m not sure Dumbarton will be available to me in time, so I’ll probably have to do a complete port in C#/.NET.