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AppleEvents: Apple’s worst documented API?
If you are trying to register a callback on getting a URL passed to your program through AppleEvents, don’t use the documented kAEInternetSuite and kAEISGetURL enums. They are defined as ‘gurl’, but the actual value passed to your program is ‘GURL’. From what I can tell, everyone defines their own enums because this is well known.
Apple can’t fix it though, because it would break everyone’s software. So they keep documenting it as ‘gurl’, and we keep redefining it to the actual value.
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Enough with the Jackass-ery
John Gruber attacks someone for criticizing the iPod. In this case, a mutual funds analyst who says that it would be better to invest the money instead of buying an iPod. Which is a good point to make. Too many people fritter their money away on gadgets instead of investing it.
Not sure why that qualifies the man as a “jackass”, but Gruber throws that term around a lot anyways.
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iLife ’08
While the new iLife ’08 software looks really good feature-wise (I’m going to pick it up today), the really important thing to watch for is what style the interfaces have. They’re the only clue MacOS X developers have anymore to what our software should look like.
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No flash for iPhone
I don’t want flash for the iPhone. People forget about how CPU heavy flash is. I don’t want a bunch of stupid punch the monkey ads running down my battery everytime I load a webpage. Many ads nowadays are Flash based and having all these tiny banner ad programs running in the background will be too much. The battery is already tottering on the edge of annoyingly frequent recharges.
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Visual Studio 2005 Express…
sucks. The installation process for getting a build environment is the most painful series of steps I have ever taken in an install. You have to download the program. Then you download the SDKs. Then you have to edit the paths in the IDE. Then you have to open the project template files and comment out various obscure configurations if you want to have a workable setup.
Why are these many steps necessary?
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iPhone costs
I’ve seen a lot of blog updates talking about the true cost of the iPhone, including the monthly fees. It comes to about $2000+ for two years. Which is true, and should be considered if you’ve never had a cell phone before.
They should be subtracting the current fees they’re already paying. I pay about $60 a month, which coincides with the $60 a month AT&T plan that’s being offered. So really, my main consideration is whether I can afford the iPhone itself.
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Python 3000 Status Update
Guido van Rossum’s Python 3000 Status Update. Nothing new if you’ve watched his tech talk, but still an interesting read.
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Programming Environment
There was a bit of downtime at work while we waited for QA to verify our release. I took the oppurtunity to get my workstation running lean and mean.
First thing was to find a good font. I’m pretty sick of Monaco. After looking at basically all of the available free programming fonts, I went with Deja Vu. It’s just like the BitStream Vera, but with more international characters. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the one true font.
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so yeah, twitter
follow lampshadish at http://twitter.com I finally signed up for a twitter account today after some prodding from my friend.
I gotta say, I’m not really feeling it. As a programmer, I really don’t want to see constant notifications distracting me and taking me out of the zone. And if I hide Twitterrific and set the update timer to 10 minutes, what’s the point?
Right now, the best use of Twitter is as a distributed notification framework, like Growl, but the notifications show up on your cellphone.
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Ardour releases 2.0!
After two years of work, Ardour has released version 2.0. I’ve been working with Paul Davis on and off for about six years now, and I am enormously happy.