Author Archives: Jens Ayton
Key to QWERTY
Recently on the Twitterwebs, Peter Hosey asked for a library that takes a character and returns the corresponding virtual key code (implicitly, in the U.S. keyboard layout). The intention was to use it to specify default key bindings when binding … Continue reading
Hacking your Log Messages
More nasty code inspired by IRC conversations, but this time aimed at the iPhone SDK – although it will work on Mac OS X as well, and on WebObjects 4 for Windows NT, and probably on at least some flavours of NextStep. Simply drop this … Continue reading
Property List Extractors
Continuing a theme of tearing out useful bits of functionality from Oolite, and inspired by recent Twitter exchanges with Craig Hockenberry and Rainer Brockerhoff, here’s some really boring code for you all – gruntwork that you don’t want to repeat, … Continue reading
Hacking your Crash Reports
In a conversation on #macdev, it was pointed out that the Crash Reporter has an “Application Specific Information:” line when certain Apple apps crash. This obviously warranted investigation, and through the powers of Google it was determined that said investigation … Continue reading
The Mysteries of iCal, Revealed!
Note: As of Snow Leopard, this functionality has been superseded by an official Dock tile plug-in mechanism. One of the minor yet shiny new features of Mac OS X 10.5 is that iCal’s dock icon now shows the correct date … Continue reading
A Corny Plug-in
As soon as I saw Gus Mueller’s offer of a free license for anyone writing a decent plug-in for Acorn, I felt moved to exploit his generosity contribute to the nascent plug-in community. So I quickly slapped together a possibly-useful … Continue reading
Priority Queue
The Foundation framework: it has some collections. It doesn’t have others. In particular, it doesn’t have a priority queue, which I need. CoreFoundation does, but this is for Oolite so it needs to work with GNUstep. Yes, I could bring … Continue reading
Performance Comparisons of Common Operations, PPC Edition
Mike Ash has written some microbenchmarks to test the speed of operations like Objective-C message dispatch and object creation, in response to people’s premature optimizations based on unfound assumptions. This is one of those issues that comes up rather often. … Continue reading
GLSL uniform bindings for Cocoa
Executive summary: This article demonstrates the use of Objective-C’s dynamic object model and the Foundation framework to extract attributes from objects using information not available at compile time. This is done on the context of implementing OpenGL Shader Language support … Continue reading