Mar 02

Buying a replacement for something stolen is like rewriting a paper

Personal 1 Comment »

I bet most of you have gone through the experiencing of losing all, or part, of a document that you have spent a lot of time on. Having to rewrite this is a painful feeling, much worse than having to write new content (even though in theory it is easier as you already know what to write).

This week someone broke into our car and nabbed our TomTom. It was hidden in a glove compartment, in a gated condo area. They had been watching, and they broke the rear window in broad daylight to get their prize. I hope they feel proud.

Having to purchase another system is a pain. You plot down your credit card and back comes….. what you already just had!

The whole gated community thing irritates me too. It is trivial to get in, and one door is always just open. Get rid of the gates and put in some video recorders.

Welcome to California.

Mar 02

“RSS Proves to Solve Information Overload”

Tech No Comments »

I had to laugh quite loudly when I saw “RSS Proves to Solve Information Overload” as a title in my email inbox.

The email itself has great proof of this fact:

This fact was recently validated by Microsoft in its launch of Vista, which delivers support of RSS.

Yeah. RSS is really helping me with my info overload :/

Mar 01

Building a Desktop Shell around a Web page for Apple Mac OS X with Cocoa

Apple, Google, Tech 7 Comments »

gmailgcaldock

As we use web applications more and more on core tasks (email, calendar, office) I have found that I sometimes get frustrated when some annoying piece of Flash on a random web page brings down my entire browser process (including the web applications that I care about).

Some browsers allow you to run multiple instances in their own world. For others you could hack around that by having multiple copies of the browser. I have gone through phases of compartmentalizing my work on various browsers.

  • Development work on a Firefox instance because I want to use Firebug
  • Fluffy browsing on WebKit nightly (to try to be a tester too)
  • Apps in Safari

My main problem with this is that I normally also want Firefox for certain apps because I make heavy use of Greasemonkey. I couldn’t do Gmail without at this point (let alone the other sites).

I am used to having my calendar on window 2 of VirtueDesktop (iCal). I am not experimenting with Google Calendar, and I want to do the same. Instead of just having an instance running Google Calendar over there, I decided to try to built a wrapper around a browser component.

I am trying this in both Mac OS X Cocoa, and Adobe Apollo.

Today we will discuss the OS X version.

In theory the hard work is definitely already done for us. The WebKit component is nicely done for us, and the documentation is thorough.

I decided to try to follow the “Multiple Windows” example:

You can implement multiple windows in a Web Kit application easily by beginning with a Cocoa document-based architecture as follows:

  1. Using Xcode, create a document-based Cocoa application. Your new project file will already contain the needed classes and interface files to support multiple windows (namely MyDocument.h, MyDocument.m, and MyDocument.nib).

  2. Add the Web Kit frameworks to your project.

  3. Open MyDocument.nib using Interface Builder and drag a WebView from the Cocoa