Archive for January, 2006

In Cocoa, it is pretty easy to use an NSButton that creates a drop down menu. One of the key-tricks to making it appear to be an NSPopUpButton is to set the [NSCell sendActionOn:]. Generally, menus are displayed on mouse down, not up. Normally, the action for a button is sent on mouse up. To get around this, you can simply access the cell of your button and tell it to send the action on mouse down: [[mybutton cell] sendActionOn:NSLeftMouseDownMask]; Cool!

Uniplex Episode 2 is out! Download the w4v file and play it with QuickTime 7 or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. This episode has Trevor Blackwell and his self-balancing electric unicycle. Plus, some interviews with the bunch of coker-addicts who are going on a uni tour through Laos!

Today is my one year anniversary at Apple! Apple is a great company, and I have been having a great time working on the AppKit framework and I’m looking forward to all the cool new things in Leopard that I get to work on.

Today, I finished box #3. It is a simple box, with a slight pyramid shape. The edges slant upwards at a 5 degree angle. It is made of redwood (home depot junk redwood!) that I resized to 1/2“ on my crappy table saw. The top fits on the base via a rabbet on underneath the lid. The finish is Danish oil. Check out the four pictures in my gallery: Corbin’s Pictures – Box #3

Today, I went to the UCSC Arboretum with Chris Bensen and took some great pictures in between some pouring rain downfalls. I used my 100mm macro lens, and I got a few good shots. Take a look at my favorites here at Corbin’s Pictures – Proteas – UCSC Arboretum. Here’s an oversight. Here is a gorgeous protea, glistening in the rain: A really cool depth of field in this photo of a Bansky (sp): Cool droplets, falling off the flower: My dad used to grow proteas at our house in Corralitos. I have always had an interest in flowers, and... [read more]

On last Tuesday night, I took my first tango lesson. It is really cool! Check out Steppin’ Out Productions.

Hi All. I use synergy to share my keyboard/mouse on my computers. I recompiled the server for Intel MacOS. Feel free to grab it and use it: synergyc_synergys_mac_intel.zip. It is an Intel ONLY binary. It will not work on PPC.

If you haven’t heard, Apple has new laptops, the MacBook Pro. I want one!

Last weekend, I took a trip up to Castle Rock state park. It is a popular climbing destination, and there is some gorgeous scenery. I went by myself, and brought my camera along with my climbing shoes strapped to my waist. I put up a gallery for some of the best photos here: Corbin’s Pictures – Castle Rock – January 2005. I’ll highlight a few of my favorites. Here is a cool picture of a very mossy branch: In the gallery, you can see a few pictures before and after it giving different perspectives. I was quite happy with this... [read more]

It is pretty easy to create a custom Color Picker that is available in any application, or for just your particular app. It isn’t difficult to do, but there are some caveats that you must be aware of. I’m going to go over this as a step-by-step tutorial; we need more Cocoa tutorials out there, so this will be one of them! Start by creating a new Cocoa Bundle inside of Xcode (File | New Project…) Now, be careful what you name your bundle — the name must correspond to the main color picker’s classname. Once you have your project... [read more]

In today’s modern day and age, making things seems to be a lost art. In junior high, and high school, I took a few woodshop classes. I’ve always enjoyed woodworking, and making things with my hands, so I want to get back into it. I’ve been slowly trying to acquire woodworking tools. Box 01 I made the mistake of buying a cheap tablesaw ($100 on craigslist, but it had a $50 blade on it), and now I’m on the constant lookout for a good one. I refurbished my dad’s old radial arm saw, and I’m now using that to make... [read more]

If you are interested in having a house to stay at when you visit Maui, well, this one might be for you! A single family house with a detached “Ohana”/cottage. The Ohana currently is rented out ($800/month), and the front house can easily be rented or moved into. It is about 7 houses from the ocean. $569,000. Visit the Maui MLS Listing for more information. I am the seller, and my dad is the listing broker. Call Stan at 808-667-2277. Living room from the kitchen

Hi Apple Cocoa developers. Here are some more tips and tricks for Cocoa development. On Tiger, there is a new class called NSMetadataQuery that allows you to do some cool Spotlight searches. See the “Spotlighter” demo application included in /Developer/Examples/AppKit/Spotlighter. Creating a predicate to get the search results that you want can be tricky, but alas, there is an easy way! First, do a search inside of Finder that has the criteria you want. For example, below is a search for all images recently created: Hit the save button and save it to your desktop. You can then show the... [read more]

Apple Cocoa developers: Finally another blog entry for you! Everyone else: You may want to skip this one… It has come to my attention that some NSTableView instances created by dragging CoreData objects into Interface Builder will not work quite right. Specifically, if you add one more row from a case like this: you will sometimes see the header disappear: Looking at the NSTableView in IB reveals that it has an offset frame location, which you cannot change: The solution is to add an outlet to the NSTableView inside your controller and add a bit of code to correct the... [read more]