Vlad Alexa's Blog

Sparkle is the updates framework for cocoa that “just works” , yea ok it does , however the documentation for it is a bit lacking on some very important aspects that i discovered over time :

1 – the preferences for your application must have SUAutomaticallyUpdate TRUE for autoupdates to happen , just setting SUEnableAutomaticChecks TRUE in the app’s Info.plist is not enough ,

NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];

[defaults setBool:YES forKey:@"SUAutomaticallyUpdate"];

[defaults synchronize];

OR

SUUpdater *updater = [SUUpdater updaterForBundle:[NSBundle mainBundle]];

[updater setAutomaticallyChecksForUpdates:YES];

OR

create a checkbox in the preferences of your app to toggle it on , unless you do that you have to use one of the methods above directly in code.

2 – since 1.0 sparkle implemented sparkle:shortVersionString to match CFBundleShortVersionString , the problem however is that it is only used when it also sees a different version in sparkle:version , for example if your app has

CFBundleVersion 1
CFBundleShortVersionString 1.1
and the appcast has
sparkle:version=”1″
sparkle:shortVersionString=”1.2″
sparkle will say you have the latest version , it only uses shortVersionString if  version differs from CFBundleVersion

3 – some times you might also want to force a update , either when the user clicks a Update Now button or when the application launches

SUUpdater *updater = [SUUpdater updaterForBundle:[NSBundle mainBundle]];

[updater checkForUpdates:nil];

OR

[updater setAutomaticallyDownloadsUpdates:NO];

[updater checkForUpdatesInBackground];

Both check for a update , however the first way also notifies the user if the current version is the latest one , so should only be triggered from a user action.

The second can be ran transparently on startup as it will not alert the user unless there is a new update , remember to set automaticallydownloadupdates off , or else the updates will only get downloaded and never installed (bug in Sparkle 1.5 b6)

EDIT: the bug has been confirmed for 1.5 b6 by Andy Matuschak , it is fixed in the github sources however http://github.com/andymatuschak/Sparkle/

Personally i think a gesture enabled mouse is a great move , and am looking forward to seeing it implemented in more mice , besides the mighty mouse i have been using a Logitech Air mouse which has a touch scroll with momentum which i miss dearly when using the mighty mouse , i am sure the same will be true about gestures.

But for now i want to touch on some issues with the magic mouse , when it was announced i was hoping a old issue with te apple mouses might have been addressed , that is the inability to hold down both buttons , the mouse registers a left click when a user clicks with both the right and the left fingers pressing.

While the swipe functionality alleviates this a bit there are still a number of 3d applications , games , and browsers that need the old “poorman’s swipe” a left swipe being similar to pressing and holding the right button then pressing the left and vice-versa , but this way of clicking can not be entirely replaced by the swipe feature as you can not swipe and drag for example.

What i do hope is that software developers will start to be aware of gesture enabled mice and of mice lacking 2button hold functionality , or even better mice manufacturers start making mice that implement both features , in any event here is a osx application i wrote for the purpose of testing mouse functionality.

Wether you like to have a file manager running as root , need a file manager that can really dig into the guts of the os or are just nostalgic for the good ole 2 pane commanders , either way you got to have mc handy on your brand new 64 bit osx.

There are a number of ways to install it , you can go all out downloading the source and dependences and compile , or take a easy road by means of the macports or fink  packages , however there you might find this way the easiest .

Attached to this post is a zip file with the compiled sources, download and extract it to the root directory of /mc , then open a terminal with 5 tabs , type “cd” in each then drag each of the folders to a different tab , press enter in each , then type “sudo make install” in each tab , in this order : gettext > pkgconfig > glib > slang > mc.

That’s all there is to it, delete /mc, now type mc to get your native 64bit mc fix.

By default OSX comes with the industry standard apache web server , only OSX server comes with a mysql server however and none are configured my default for php.

Here it is , the first precompiled version of google’s Chrome browser for OSX , whether you want to test your pages in it , or just take a firsthand look of the development so far on the mac version be aware that this is a very early revision and very unstable , for example it just crashes when loading nytimes.com , most websites i visited work fine however.

You can download it from here (or Chromium.app and TestShell.app individually), inside are two apps , Chromium.app and TestShell.app , they are the Release builds of revision 9854 for Leopard (10.5) of Google’s open source code behind Chrome , which is actually called Chromium.

TestShell.app is just the core rendering view , Chromium.app is the whole app so far but websites do not always load in it and rendering can be garbled , just use TestShell to test pages.

I am not affiliated with Google or Apple and i do not take any responsibility nor imply any functionality of these builds i am making available , have fun.

find /Volumes/myvolume/mydir -name “.DS_Store” -print0 | xargs -0 rm -v

rm -rfv ~/Library/Caches/

sudo rm -rfv /System/Library/Caches/ /Library/Caches/

sudo rm -rfv /private/var/folders/

Since i started dual booting either Tiger or Leopard one thing that really annoyed me was that i had to deal with 2 itunes libraries , not being able to have the same thing in itunes no matter what i boot into.

mv ~/music/iTunes /Volumes/IStorage/

ln -s /Volumes/IStorage/Itunes/ ~/music/iTunes

What we need to do is basically change metadata of files by adding type “MooV” to them , the simplest way to do it is download this applescript droplet i wrote and just drag the files you want fixed on its icon.

find /path/toyour/movies/directory -name “*.avi” -print0 | xargs -0 /developer/tools/SetFile -t “MooV”

OSX is nice , and not because it has no shortcomings , but because you can fix them as opposed to windows.This has a lot to do with the power of osx that stems from it having applescript and a posix compliant shell.

Here is how to change metadata of files so you can play divx movies with itunes for example , with terminal and devtools

find /path/toyour/movies/directory -name “*.avi” -print0 | xargs -0 /developer/tools/SetFile -t “MooV”

, with applescript http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=214705

Now that you can play those files with itunes how about having them show and play in Front Row from the confort of your remote , without even adding them to the itunes library , it is just a matter of making symbolic links in your ~/Movies folder to the directories containing your movies , you can use the shell or just alt+cmd drag them to ~/Movies to make the links.

If yo do not know by now you can download movies from youtube just by selecting the file in Safari > Activity > Copy > Paste into downloads window.

How about playing every movie format there is including the flash movies you just downloaded from youtube in anything you like , quicktime , itunes , frontrow etc , well then just download http://perian.org/ and never care about formats of movies ever again.

To top it off i have a script for those times when you do want to know what are your movie files encoded with , this is a extremely fast shell script , with basic info , you can get it packaged as a osx app to drag folders to or directly as a cross-platform script.