An Experiment in Bloggery

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.

(This post was adapted from an email I sent to Mike Solomon).

Objective-C has a method caching mechanism that optimizes for the case where a small number of methods are called repeatedly on one (or more) objects of a given class. This happens very often; for example, if you iterate over an array to gather the results of performing an operation on each element, you’re going to be calling the same method on a bunch of instances of the same class. And in fact the -[NSEnumerator nextObject] method itself will also be cached.

The fact that method caching exists is common knowledge. However, what isn’t generally known is how that caching is implemented, and what it means for you if you want to hack around on the internals of a class.

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Ironcoder 0x2 wraps up in a few hours, and this time the API was CoreGraphics. As soon as I heard this, I knew I wanted to do something with window mesh deformation. What’s that? Why, it’s the private CoreGraphics call you can use to do the effects such as the Genie minimize effect, though I believe it’s new in 10.3. It’s a function called CGSSetWindowWarp(), and it’s extremely poorly documented.

First, some history. CoreGraphics has a bunch of private calls that range from applying transitions to windows (such as the cube effect seen in Apple Remote Desktop and Quicksilver) to managing virtual desktops to setting alpha levels on groups of windows system-wide. As far as I am able to ascertain, Richard Wareham did the bulk of the work to expose these calls, as part of development on his Desktop Manager program, the most well-known virtual desktop solution for OS X. He released a file named CGSPrivate.h that contained these basic calls, so others could use it. Since then, more private calls have been discovered, and among them were CGSSetWindowWarp().

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Typo 4.0 is out! Many thanks to Scott Laird for his wonderful work on Akismet support and the new gem installer.

Earlier today Yahoo! finally released Yahoo! Messenger for OS X 3.0 beta 1, with an incredibly positive reaction from the general public. This is the app that I’ve spent the last 8 months working on, and I’m really proud to have finally released our first public beta. Even if you don’t use the old client, you should check it out. It’s a 100% rewrite in Cocoa, with a brand new spiffy UI, Growl support, avatar support, and more.

Chris Liscio just released the next major version of his application, FuzzMeasure Pro 2.0. I think congratulations for all his hard work are in order.

Well, it took me a while to track down, but if you’ve ever needed documentation on the Rez file format, you want the Building and Managing programs in MPW manual from developer.apple.com.

With the availability of a universal SIMBL plugin I’ve now released a universal version of SafariSource. Download here.

After a couple hours of hacking I managed to come up with a ruby script that generated a GraphViz dot file that describes all of the Universal Type Identifiers on the system. I’ll release it later once I make it a bit more usable, but right now I have a dot file to hand out. If you don’t have GraphViz installed you can download the dmg, or you can use OmniGraffle. Just open up the file in Graphviz.app or OmniGraffle.app - note however, that OmniGraffle seems to screw up the border and widths of all the nodes, so if you don’t have a registered version (and thus cannot edit the file), you should stick with Graphviz.

Download: utigraph.zip

I just spent some time and put together a bunch of user-defined commands to aid debugging with gdb on intel machines. They allow you to do things like print arguments to the current method, print arguments for the method about to be called, print return values, etc. To try them out, download this file, put it in your home folder, and rename it to .gdbinit. Then the next time you run gdb, try running help user-defined to get a synopsis of all new commands. You can ask for help on a specific command for more details as well.

The basis for this was inspired by Daniel Jalkut on the #macsb channel.

Update: I just added a new function getret. Re-download to get the changes.