FoggyBloggin' » Developer

148Apps Interview

August — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:54:06 +0000

The good folks at 148Apps have posted an interview with yours truly for their “App Store Insider” podcast. Apparently, I’m something of a blabbermouth, because they had to split the thing into 2 parts!

Thanks to Tom Hesser for inviting me to be on the show. It was a blast!

Published!

August — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:07:30 +0000

After a few weeks of production and red tape, I’m happy to announce that my book is finally available! Optimizing your Website for Mobile Safari is a guide designed to help you prepare your website for the onslaught of iPhone and iPod touch users.

It was a lot of fun doing this, and I’m already knees deep in another book. Plus, I’ve got updates of Desktopple and Server Siren in the pipeline. More soon!

And if you don’t mind, send me some Digg love.

ISBN 0321544013

August — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:59:40 +0000

If you’re wondering why things have been quiet around here, it’s because over the last several weeks I’ve been working on my very first book. I turned in the first draft yesterday, and I’m anxiously awaiting the first round of editor’s notes.

I’ll have more details soon…

C4[1]

August — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 21:35:25 +0000

For those that care, I’ll be at C4[1] this weekend in Chicago. If you’re one of those hard-core Mac developers attending the anti-WWDC, drop me a line — I’d love to meet up!

Podcasting with the Typical Mac User

August — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 22:18:09 +0000

Victor Cajiao, of the Typical Mac User podcast, has invited me to co-host with him this Sunday (June 10th).

We’ll be talking about FoggyNoggin Software, of course, but I’m sure we’ll also be talking about my days helping get podcasting off the ground. It’s should be fun, and anyone can join in!

The Case of the Mysterious “Can’t cache image” Error

August — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:30:35 +0000

I’ve been working a bit on Desktopple Pro. It doesn’t matter how thorough or how long the test, Beta Tests can’t catch everything. So whenever there’s a release, you’re always going to have a lingering bug or two. And today, I’ve been squashing those bugs.

I had just done a build, tried to load the Desktopple Pro preference pane to test it, and, for some strange reason, it wouldn’t load. A quick check of the Console log revealed this rather terse error message:

Can't cache image

I tried a fresh build, and I got the same error. Puzzled, I then turned to Google. A search revealed a lot of hits for that phrase, but no real answers on the cause or the solution.

Worse, the bugs I had been working on were in the Desktopple app, not the preference pane, so the problem wasn’t a result of a code change, but something that was already there!

Fortunately, after a few hours of pulling out my hair, I finally figured it out. And since Google didn’t help, and there really weren’t any solutions out there, I’m posting mine. Hopefully, it will save others the frustration of trying to figure out this unhelpful error message.

Turns out that if you -lockFocus on an NSImage with either a zero width or a zero height, you’ll get the “Can’t cache image” error (other issues may cause it as well).

The solution is easy: before locking focus on the image, make sure the image has non-zero height and width.

Look for this fix (as well as a couple others in Desktopple Pro) in a day or so.

Learning Cocoa

August — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 17:35:32 +0000

For those aspiring developers out there, Scott Stevenson has posted Part II of his introduction to Cocoa series (if you missed, Part I is here).

Scott does a fantastic job of presenting complex concepts in easy-to-understand ways, and if you are interested in getting started in Mac/Cocoa programming, I recommend his tutorials without hesitation. In fact, when I was just learning, Scott’s Cocoa site, CocoaDevCentral, was instrumental in so many ways.

Great job, Scott!

Resolution Independence, the Command Line, and TIFFer

August — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 17:55:50 +0000

Apple and “resolution independence” are a hot topic right now. The talk has focused mainly the merits of vector-based art versus rasterized bitmaps. I don’t know enough about either to jump into the fray, so I won’t even try. What I do know is that developers will end up using both vectors and bitmaps whether they want to or not.

In Leopard, Apple nicely included a little command line utility that takes two TIFF images of differing resolutions and combines them. It first checks to see if the images can be combined (making sure the resolutions match up, etc.). It then compresses the resulting combined image. The problem with the utility is that it’s command line based, so you end up doing a lot of needless typing.

While working to update some of my apps to include resolution independence, I found myself dropping into the command line a lot. To save time, I whipped up a little utility called TIFFer. It’s basically a wrapper around the Apple utility, but I find it fits into my workflow much better. It’s freeware for any developers who might need it, so get it now.

[Caveat Emptor: This is a Leopard-only app, and I've only tested it on my machine. If it doesn't work for you (and you're running Leopard), please let me know.]