An Experiment in Bloggery

Recently I was contracted to write some software, and it’s just now been released. It’s called GrabUp. Basically, the whole purpose here is for zero-click sharing of screenshots. GrabUp is a daemon that sits in the background and waits for you to take a screenshot, then it instantly uploads it to the GrabUp servers and puts the URL on your clipboard. It has a nice status item to let you know when it’s done. If you have GrabUp running and you want to share an image, just take the screenshot and then paste the URL anywhere. So far, GrabUp has been seen in TUAW and we also got a rather nice blog post reviewing it.

I’ve just pushed a new version of SafariSource out the door which is once again compatible with Safari Tidy. Please let me know if you have any problems. You can download it here.

Note that this requires version 0.2.5 of Safari Tidy, which was just released today.

For those interested, I am currently maintaining git mirrors of the MacPorts and TextMate Bundles svn repositories on GitHub. I update these periodically, but at the moment only the master branch is published.

• MacPorts
• TextMate Bundles

I just released a new version of SafariSource which supports Safari 3.0 last night. This morning I received a Czech localization from Jakub Formanek, so I just released SafariSource v1.7.1. with the new localization.

So if you’re using Safari 3.0, or if you’re Czech, go ahead and download SafariSource. If you’re using Safari 2.x, please let me know it still works as I can’t test that with 3.0 installed.

tcltumblr 0.1 is available for immediate use. It is a Tcl library that provides access to the Tumblr API.

Download

After months of absence, Typosphere has returned from the dead!

We migrated off of Planet Argon and onto DreamHost, where we should have more control. We also upgraded to Trac 0.10.3 and turned off anonymous editing (users now have to register to file a ticket). This should (hopefully) prevent the issue that lead to Typosphere dying in the first place.

(more…)

Haml is a new markup format for Ruby on Rails apps that just hit 1.0. At first glance it looks pretty odd, but it turns out to be really easy to write in, and it’s shorter and, actually, easier to read than the equivalent eRB.

I think I’m going to convert Typo to use Haml for all its templates. I already did Azure’s layout file and it was pretty simple.

Method Swizzling is one common technique of people writing hacks, such as Safari Plugins. Unfortunately, it’s always suffered from a flaw, wherein swizzling inherited methods affects all classes which inherit that method (including the base class), rather than the intended subclass. This problem is discussed on the CocoaDev Method Swizzling page.

As part of writing YubNubSearch, I decided to solve this problem.

First I looked into dynamic subclass generation + posing. Unfortunately, this has a big problem. In this technique, calling the original implementation would naturally be done through a [super foo] call. Unfortunately, when the compiler sees super, it hardcodes a reference to the superclass at which to start the search. This means you cannot write this code in, say, a category on NSObject, then pull up the IMP into a dynamically-generated subclass and have it work. So that throws out that idea.

The other idea I had, which I eventually went with, was to copy inherited methods into the subclass that you wish to swizzle, before swizzling. It turned out to be fairly easy, and still has the same semantics as the old, flawed technique for calling the original implementation.

You can download my implementation here.

I just polished up my SIMBL plugin for release. It’s called YubNubSearch and it allows you to use YubNub as your default search engine in Safari.

You can get it here.

As of this afternoon, I am now an official committer for MacPorts.

For those not in the know, MacPorts (née DarwinPorts) is an open-source package manager for Darwin (although it should work with other *nixes, it’s really intended for Darwin). I’ve been using it for quite some time, and even contributed a few Portfiles a while ago. Well, I started poking at it again recently, and then jmpp on #macports convinced me to apply for a commit bit.

Now I just gotta do something to justify this shiny new bit.