I like YUIDoc. I don’t like its default theme. Since I couldn’t find any other themes on them internets, I wrote my own, named “Dana”. Since I normally use YUIDoc to document either pure Javascript or jQuery code1, I didn’t keep any of the old YUI code; I’ve ditched pretty much everything and started from scratch. And this is what I’ve come up with: As you can see in the screenshot, as an example I’ve generated the well-known YUI API docs.
Over the last few months I’ve been clocking in ~180km in my Vibram FiveFingers. For the most part I take it slow; I run when I feel like it (which is rather often), and I check out routes I’ve not ran before. Sometimes these are long, sometimes not so much. And I’m happy to say that apart from a one-time, mild case of shin splints caused by running too slowly (I’m not kidding) a few weeks back which “grounded” me for a few days, I am without injury and pain.
Interesting article in the NYTimes: Rivals Seize on Troubles of Facebook. Ultimately, I doubt there’ll be enough momentum for any of these sites to really take off. And yes, I say that despite me backing Diaspora*. But I believe they will fail to attract a serious following because in the end, you go where your people are, and they’re not there yet. Herd mentality meets chicken & egg. I—as an end user—would need to decide whether my jumping ship @ FB is more important than loosing the “posse” I’ve built there during the time I’ve used the site.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 Wore my Nike Free yesterday, as they’re the most flexible (actual) shoes I own. No time for running, tho, also still some residue muscle pain. Today: Beautiful morning, decided to ignore the bus and walk to the subway. 3.5 km in my Nikes, and while they’re pretty good, I miss the ability to wiggle my toes. Came home, went for a 3.5 km VFF walk with Dana.
Reading Christopher McDougall’s highly interesting and inspirational “Born to Run”, I came back to my idea of running (semi-)barefoot. Turns out there are a lot of people with the same idea, and companies catering to this idea. So last Thursday I treated myself to a new pair of Vibram FiveFingers KSO. (My new Vibram FiveFingers KSO) VFF are basically what you would get if you dipped your feet into molten rubber, minus, you know, the excrutiating pain, blistering skin and earache caused by your own frantic screaming.
Last night I’ve released a new version of Ephemera, my 2-way Instapaper /ebook-reader sync tool for Mac. Here’s what’s new: NEW: The app runs on both 32 and 64 bit Snow Leopard now. NEW: When auto-sync is enabled and you plug in your reading device, Ephemera will show a “Going to sync…” dialog for 5 seconds, where you can temporarily disable syncing. NEW: Support for password-less Instapaper accounts. FIX: Preferences menu item will be correctly disabled during sync.
This post references MacRuby 0.5, used with Xcode 3.2 on Snopard (10.6.2); the general technique will likely work on other OS/Xcode version, tho. Just saying. Apps with more than just one framework The standard MR app template massages $LOAD_PATH a bit in order to have apps which embed the MR framework use said embedded framework in Release builds. The piece of code in question looks like this: if Dir.exist?(NSBundle.mainBundle.privateFrameworksPath) $:.map! { |x| x.
This post references MacRuby 0.5, used with Xcode 3.2 on Snopard (10.6.2); the general technique will likely work on other OS/Xcode version, tho. Just saying. At some point in my project I needed to access OSX' Keychain to store sensitive userdata. Unfortunately, due to the lack of void pointers in MacRuby 0.5 (see Trac ticket), I couldn’t use standard methods like SecKeychainAddGenericPassword. The guys on the mailing list told me to use a wrapper instead.
I’ve built my first Mac app: Ephemera, which offers two-way Instapaper.com sync for your ebook reader. Here’s its story, my motivation, and what it does. Preface Ephemera is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with Instapaper.com or Marco Arment. I’m just a huge fan. How it came to be A few months ago, in Oct or Nov 2009, about an hour after getting my Kindle 21 I just knew that it would be the perfect device to read my news on.
This post references MacRuby 0.5b2, used with Xcode 3.2 on Snopard (10.6.2). At some point you’ll probably want to create a release build for your app. You’d like to compile it and embed the MacRuby framework so the app is self- contained. Cool beans. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it seems. Yes, the MacRuby Xcode template contains both an “Embed” and a “Compile” target, and they seem to work fine.
Some things I’ve learned or discovered during the last few days. Nothing special, but taking notes is usually a good idea, so there. Get values fromInfo.plist For example, app name and version: info = NSBundle.mainBundle.infoDictionary info.objectForKey("CFBundleName") info.objectForKey("CFBundleVersion") Open an URL in the default browser: url = NSURL.URLWithString("http://municode.de/") NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace.openURL(url) Run an AppleScript Sometimes you want to execute a short AppleScript snippet to save yourself some time by using the higher-level functionality AS offers instead of writing a huge block of MacRuby.
Just a note, mostly to myself: The default XCode MacRuby rb_main.rb template will contain these lines: Dir.entries(dir_path).each do |path| if path != File.basename(__FILE__) && path.match(/\.rb$/) require(path) end end Works fine for uncompiled files, but when you want to compile your app, there’ll be no *.rb files — just *.rbo files. So rb_main.rb needs to be adjusted. Dir.entries(dir_path).each do |path| if path != File.basename(__FILE__) && path.match(/\.rbo?$/) require(path) end end I just spent 15 minutes wondering about these Unknown class 'Controller', using 'NSObject' instead.