Lap Cat Software Blog

Despite what I said in my comment, I did end up taking Daniel Jalkut’s message to heart.

To an extent. A tad.

Basically, I cleared out some dead and abandoned feeds. I added a few new ones too. Sorry Daniel, I’m incorrigible! I’m also an enabler: for all you news junkies out there, get your fix by downloading the updated opml of my Favorite Feeds, available in the sidebar of my blog. Go ahead, just browse a bit. Once you develop a taste for syndication — by a taste for I mean an addiction to — you’ll need a powerful feed reader. And then … well, that’s about it.

I’ve been asked what I do for a living by a number of my loyal fans. For example, two of my parents. (The third doesn’t care.) Deplorably, I receive no residuals from “The Distinguished Gentleman”, so I guess that I’m a working man. I tried working for no pay, but as rewarding as that was, I couldn’t get my landlord to appreciate the value of my contributions to the open source community. Therefore, I had to sell out to The Man.

The man, in this case, was Marko Karppinen. Marko, you Da Man! Paul, you de Man. When I joined Marko Karppinen & Co., the hazing began immediately: my first assignment was to implement full disk encryption. I also had to purify myself in the waters of Lake Päijänne. I must have passed the initiation, though, because Knox 1.5 is here. It kicks ass! (It sure kicked my ass.) If you don’t believe me, you can download and try it yourself free for 30 days. Launch it from the distribution dmg for kicks. Knox makes encrypting your data effortless, disproving the proverb that you can’t put a price on security. In my opinion, Knox is under-priced, and I’m not saying that because I’m financially compensated by MK&C. Actually, I’m not financially compensated by MK&C.

No, Marko isn’t holding my cats hostage for code. I decided to leave the company recently to pursue another opportunity. Plus, the daily commute to Helsinki was kind of long. I left on good terms, hopefully, and I miss those Pyro-maniacs, my fellow MKCKittens (inside joke). They’re a great group of folks! The strangest aspect of my job was that I never met my coworkers, since I quit right before WWDC. D’oh! I like to imagine that the gang at MK&C is exactly like Dethklok. Did anyone see Toki at the Moscone Center? I guess that makes me Pickles, or maybe the rock & roll clown.

It should be noted that according to my careful tests — I checked my gut and Wikipedia — Knox 1.5 was entirely bug free when I finished. By that irrefutable logic, therefore, any problems that you think you may experience with Knox 1.5 are purely imaginary, and you should ask your doctor about Thorazine. I cannot say the same, however, about that whole Master Control Program I wrote, which got a little out of hand.

My other major project at MK&C was Pyro 1.6. If you use Campfire chat, then Pyro will blow your mind. Or anyway, it significantly enhances the experience. Among the new features Pyro 1.6 introduces is instantaneous switching between multiple chat rooms. (I’m partial toward automatic zip-archiving and uploading of folders and packages.) If you don’t use Campfire, you and your company should give it a try. We used Campfire extensively for internal communication and for customer support.

By the way, there are apparently some problems with Pyro under the deceptively-named Safari 3 beta. That’s not our fault, because Apple released it without any advanced notice to developers. The so-called Safari beta is actually an update to the WebKit system framework, affecting any application on your computer that uses WebKit, not just Safari. The Safari beta has caused problems for other apps too, including Vienna and Apple’s own Mail and iChat, so apparently it was a secret within Apple as well, or they didn’t test it enough. Brutal.

Ranting aside, I’d like to thank Marko for letting me hack on his public-facing apps. Not only would I like to thank him, but I shall. Thanks, Marko! I hope that he and everyone else enjoy the results. Now I must move on and take the next step in my goal of total world domination … by cats.

Yesterday was the Fourth of July, as long as you live below — that is, West of — UTC. In the US, we spend that day commemorating our victory over the UK in our War of Independence by recreating those war-like conditions for our children to experience. Sometimes the experience is so vivid that they end up in the emergency room with various degrees of burns. In the UK, on the other hand, it is traditional for the Brits (the English, Her Majesty’s Royal Subjects, people of no color, whichever term they prefer) to commemorate their own war experience by losing at Wimbledon.

I don’t wish to denigrate the Brits, though; I have every respect for them. After all, they did give us Isaac Newton and Led Zeppelin. Even more important (for our purposes here), they gave us Vienna, or at least Steve Palmer did. The latest stable version, Vienna 2.1.3, has just been released for your enjoyment. Downloads and change notes are available at SourceForge. This release includes an update of SQLite that fixes a potential database corruption issue, so it is important that you switch to the new version of Vienna.

An unstable version, Vienna 2.2.0.2202 (which also includes the SQLite fix), was also recently released. Actually, we didn’t really release it so much as it just got out. If you encounter build 2202 in the wild, it is recommended that you roll up into the fetal position and play dead. Running away will only make it angrier. Whatever you do, don’t try to hit it with a tennis racquet.

I’ve updated my list of Favorite Feeds, which you can download from the sidebar of my blog. The list is in opml format, so you import it into feed readers such as Vienna. And speaking of Vienna, a new beta version of Vienna 2.2 has just been released. If you’re an intrepid or foolhardy type, you can download it from SourceForge. Beware: this is a pre-release version we’ve released. That’s impossible and therefore pretty scary in itself. Moreover, Vienna 2.2 hasn’t been fully tested. It’s certain to have bugs, perhaps an STD or two. We take no responsibility if your computer decides to start playing Global Thermonuclear War; in that unfortunate event, set the controls for the heart of the sun.

Wow, this series already has four parts. It’s entering Rocky territory, having already surpassed Rambo. If I continue much longer I’ll be typecast — (NSNib *)jeff — and no one will remember my work on Vienna or my poignant portrayal of Hamlet (in the community theater production of Guys and Dolls).

A comment by Jack Nutting inspired me to run some additional tests. As the-programmer-currently-known-as-j-o-a-r (formerly known as horse-spear) mentioned in another comment, you can use the method -[NSApplication setAppleMenu:] to set the application menu. The catch is that it’s been removed from the public API and is no longer declared in NSApplication.h. To call the method, you have to declare it yourself in a category:

@interface NSApplication (NiblessAdditions)
-(void) setAppleMenu:(NSMenu *)aMenu;
@end

You could also avoid the need for a category declaration by using [NSApp performSelector:NSSelectorFromString(@"setAppleMenu:") withObject:aMenu].

My tests revealed that AppKit does call -[NSApplication setAppleMenu:] when loading the main menu from a nib, so it appears that this method is no more (or less) fragile than the technique I discovered in Part 2. As far as I can tell, setAppleMenu: sets the title of the menu to @"Apple" and the name of the menu to @"NSAppleMenu", which is why my technique is functionally equivalent. (The method -[NSApplication setMainMenu:] sets the name of the menu to @"NSMainMenu", so my [mainMenu setValue:@"NSMainMenu" forKey:@"name"] isn’t strictly necessary.) It’s a mystery why Apple ‘disappeared’ the method. Maybe it will magically return in a later operating system, with a long beard and a dark tan.

I’m not aware of a method, hidden or otherwise, to set the recent documents menu. Thus, my technique of calling [openRecentMenu setValue:@"NSRecentDocumentsMenu" forKey:@"name"] still seems necessary. Chasing around a little chicken, though, just seems unnecessary and not very mature.

Normally I refrain from linking to other blog posts. I don’t really consider myself to be part of the blogosphere. (We are the blogocube. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Bring your own beer.) Instead, I figure that you can follow my Favorite Feeds, which you can find in the sidebar of my blog, in my favorite feed reader, which you can get from Vienna Downloads. By the way, I just updated my Favorite Feeds today.

In the case of Fail Faster by Terrence Talbot, resistance to linking was futile. His blog was not yet in my Favorite Feeds, though it is now, and more important, he stole my idea! (I actually have a file named ideas.txt.) Anyway, read the post, because it’s a good idea, naturally. I implemented the idea back in Vienna revision 446, so I guess I can’t complain that I didn’t have enough time to publish it. D’oh! I’ll just add my two cents, which by coincidence is my standard consulting fee. Another source of build failures is Xcode itself. Believe it or not, Xcode still has a few bugs. Sometimes the only way to get your project to build correctly is to Clean first. When you Clean, however, any copied resources are deleted, so if your Copy Resources phase is at the beginning of the build, you may be needlessly repeating the copy phase.

This post as you know it is over. Length is irrelevant. Closing tags, on the other hand, are relevant. You must add </p>. Comply.

I’m not only the co-President of the Vienna Club for Men, Women, and Others: I’m also a client. Before I became a Vienna developer, I was a user. During development and debugging of the app, I don’t want to corrupt my user data, e.g., database and preferences, so I back them up before I do anything dangerous. Believe me, anytime I launch Xcode, it’s dangerous.

A long time ago I created a set of Automator actions to back up the files and restore them afterward. Yes, I’m the one of the five or so people in the world who actually use Automator. (Otto who? Auto Parts?) However, after I bought a laptop — or portable computer not for use on your lap under any circumstances, on penalty of burnt naughty bits, as they say — and I started using a FileVault account, I discovered that Otto and FileVault don’t play well together. (They can’t agree on who has to be Samwise.) Thus, I needed a new method of backing up and restoring my Vienna files.

Presto Change-o, Hocus Pocus, I created a custom Xcode project to do the job. At first I was just going to provide it to Vienna developers, but then I decided that I could (semi-)easily make it configurable to handle the files of other apps, since application support files tend to reside in standard locations. Later, greed got the better of me, and I decided to charge $50 a head for my creation. Finally, sanity got the better of me, and I’m making the source available for download. You can still send me $50 if you like, $100 if you have two heads.

The project is called BackupAppFiles, which is pretty boring, I admit, but hey, my parents named me Jeff Johnson. Anyway, BackupAppFiles comes configured to handle Vienna support files. To handle the files of a different app, just change the string constants in BAFConstants.m to match the file names. You can compile different versions to handle different sets of files on the same computer, but you’ll need to change the PRODUCT_NAME build setting for each version, because the location of BAF’s own support files depends on that setting.

The standard disclaimers apply once again. I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof, etc. Please back up your files before using BackupAppFiles. (Yes, I recognize the irony there. No need to point it out, really.) I take no responsibility if BackupAppFiles erases your hard drive or makes your head explode, though I will refund your $50 in the latter case. (It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes.) Let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, or complaints. About BackupAppFiles, that is. Or a plate of shrimp. I’ll also take bug reports and patches, just no feature requests. Now let’s go get sushi.

I’ve decided to adopt Apple’s practice of naming software releases after cats. Therefore, today I’m announcing Vienna 2.1.2 Sylvester. The release notes are here, and you can download it there. Please post bug reports and feature requests yonder. It’s basically just a minor, bug fix release to tide you over until Vienna 2.2 Morris. Sufferin’ succotash! Since Vienna is open source, we’ve had to write convoluted, unreadable code in order to hide the secret new features in Morris. Not for any other reason.

That’s all, folks!

I’ve updated my list of Favorite Feeds, which is available from the Downloads category in the sidebar of my blog’s front page. It’s in .opml format for easy import into Vienna and other feed readers. The list includes a rather large collection of Cocoa developer blogs, if you’re interested in that kind of thing, and I assume that you are, because you can’t be here just for the jokes.

Speaking of Cocoa developer blogs, I do have a backlog of content that I plan to publish. Really. I’ve confronted a number of coding issues over the past few months that nearly (you be the judge) drove me insane, so I feel an obligation to write about them in order to preserve, or at least not worsen, your mental health. Stay tuned! Don’t take me off your speed dial.

Now back to our regularly scheduled static…

Vienna is new and improved! Now 10% more code for the same low price. Plus, we’ve added flavonoids! And innovative macro-absorber technology! It’s guaranteed to blow your mind while toning your thighs. If you have liver disease or high blood pressure, do not use Vienna with a bottle of bourbon.

See the release notes for all of the exciting details. Vienna 2.1.1 is available for download now at your local Starbucks or wherever coffee is sold.