Posted by Paul Haddad
Sat, 13 Oct 2007 01:16:00 GMT
Two new apps/updates are in the pipeline. A new release of PTHVolume should be out as soon as, or very soon after, Leopard ships. Nothing terribly exciting but should be useful for machines like the Mac Pros that have multiple output devices.
Hopefully a little more interesting will be a new release of PTHClock. The name is PTHClock but the app is going to be rewritten totally from scratch since I no longer own the old code. It’ll be Leopard only and hopefully have some really interesting Core Animation based effects. There should be a beta version available in a month or so (again depending on Leopard’s shipment).
Tags Apps, Beta, PTHClock | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Paul Haddad
Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:43:00 GMT
MacSanta
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Posted by Paul Haddad
Mon, 18 Dec 2006 05:44:00 GMT
Opinions on the heist abound. So why not add my own? Before I start I was never asked to be a part of this, given one of the organizers is a direct competitor I wouldn’t expect to be.
It does strike me that if the devs are getting a fixed cut of sales, then they are getting a rather small cut of the profits. Obviously no one made them join this promo, but I do wonder if any of them are regretting this? If the numbers I’ve seen around are real ($5-15k/dev) then each app sold for < $1 each. Support costs for some of these apps are bound to be over $1/copy. It’s one thing to sell 1-2k copies at a loss, 16k is something else all together. The entire thing reminds me of Walmart and Vlasic. Success can kill.
Another interesting aspect of this promo is calling it the “Week of the Independent Mac Developer”. Clearly this is not the case, it might be the Week of the Mac Consumer or the Week of the Mac Site (did you see how many ads there were?) or maybe the Week of the Creative Promo. But in the end who cares what they call it, its just marketing spin. They can call it the Week of the Purple People Eaters, it doesn’t really affect anyone
So did anyone get Heisted? I don’t think anyone will know for a while. Its certainly a positive for the promoters, its a positive for most consumers, for the charities and same for all the sites getting ad money from it. For the developers its somewhat an unknown. My guess is it’ll be a mixed bag and I hope some of the guys share their experience a few months down the line.
I’ll be gathering up stats on my Mac App a Day experiment over the next few months for all those interested.
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Posted by Paul Haddad
Thu, 07 Dec 2006 19:38:00 GMT
So after much tweaking, re-recording and re-re-re-recording the first PTHPasteboard Screencast is done. I wouldn’t say its good, but its an OK first effort. Took forever to get the video/audio settings just right but overall I’m happy with the results.
I don’t think too many people have noticed the Custom Filter Window feature, so if nothing else this is good to show that off. Feedback is as always welcomed.
Check it out!
Tags filters, pro, pthpasteboard, screencast | 5 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Paul Haddad
Sun, 03 Dec 2006 23:24:00 GMT
I love loud clicky keyboards, I just can’t seem to find a decent one. For the longest time I’ve used a Northgate OmniKey keyboard, these things are/were built like tanks and had a real nice satisfying click. Unfortunately they are Windows specific and don’t have niceties such as volume keys or built in USB ports. After one too many coke spills my Northgate started acting up. Fortunately this was around the same time the Matias Tactile Pro and Kensington StudioBoard came out.
Due to a miscommunication with my wife I ended up getting both of these as Christmas presents. Both of them have the nice Macish features that I want and decent looks. The Kensington one definitely felt better, though I’m not sure I could explain why. Unfortunately both feel pretty cheap as far as the plastics used and overall weight of the keyboard. Turns out that both are built pretty badly as neither lasted longer then about a year.
The StudioBoard again was my favorite, unfortunately one of the cheap little plastic legs broke on it. I contacted Kensington Customer Service to get a replacement and they sent me a junky $10 Keyboard in a Box as a replacement. After contacting them again I was told they didn’t make those keyboards anymore and that the junky keyboard they sent me was their replacement. So much for a company standing behind their product. Fortunately I was able to just stick a USB-PS/2 converter underneath the keyboard as a replacement leg. This worked fairly well until this keyboard started acting up as well.
A few months ago I started using the TactilePro. It just never felt right (key pressure wise) and it only worked for a few months before it started developing its own annoying problems. For some reason the Shift and Control key only seem to register being held down about 1/2 the time. This makes the keyboard pretty useless. I’d probably send it in for service, but I don’t really care for the keyboard anyways.
So now I’m back to the original Northgate. The Up Arrow key doesn’t work and neither do half the numeric keypad keys. But overall I can live with up arrow not working (Control-P is your best friend in these situations).
I think I’m going to try to grab a Customizer 104 from PCKeyboard.com, not pretty and no hub or volume keys, but it is cheap and I believe I can get them to do a decent layout (with Command/Alt keys).
Tags mac keyboard | 5 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Paul Haddad
Tue, 28 Nov 2006 03:39:00 GMT
I think I got most of the localization stuff cleaned up. The semi-automated process is conceptually fairly simple.
- Create .nib.strings files from each of the English nibs (these are basically generated with the nibtool -L command)
- Create a “dictionary” of all localized strings
- Update all localized strings files, by getting all the keys from the English version and setting the value to either, the current value, any localized value from the dictionary or the english key.
- Generate a list of strings that aren’t localized (this is basically to make sure nothing is missed).
So this basically creates a bunch of .nib.strings files (one/nib/locale). These then get fed in at build time to nibtool to generate the actual nibs from the English version and the locale strings file.
For the most part I was able to make the English nib elements large enough to accommodate the Japanese strings, though there are a few nibs where this couldn’t be done. For those I created partial nibs that contain just the offending elements and used the nibtool—incremental flag to properly size them.
The only thing I’d like to look at in the future, purely as an optimization step, is to generate the localized nibs on the fly from the English ones. Basically ship with the .nib.strings files and no nibs and have the English nibs translated as they are needed. This should make a pretty big difference size wise on the shipped executable once there are more then a few localizations.
I’m including the scripts I use below in case they are interesting to anyone. They are all written in Ruby and the only other dependency is the plist gem. They aren’t really all fully polished but should serve as a good starting point.
Tags localization, nibs, nibtool, pthpasteboard | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Paul Haddad
Sun, 19 Nov 2006 21:22:46 GMT
Version PTHPB 4.0.1 should be here tom. The big change here is that its localized in Japanese.
Localization is one of those things I think needs to be improved in OS X. Sure its real easy to do a localization, but maintenance tends to be a nightmare. Standard .strings are pretty easy to deal with, but nibs get ugly real fast.
The way I’ve dealt with .nibs in the past is to use Localized strings to generate a new Localize nib from the original English nib. This works, but the big problem is that you end up having to make the English nibs be able to handle larger strings. Which means that a lot of times the English rev looks bad.
There’s an “—incremental” flag to nibtool that might help things out, I’ll have to play with it. My preference however would be to separate the localizations from the app bundles. I think it’d be neat if each .nib was versioned and the Cocoa code was smart enough to read in localized versions that match the English/dev revs.
Stick the localizations in App Support or Library dirs and have code smart enough to check/update the Localizers home pages for new revs. I think something like that could really decouple the code from the localizations and I wish Apple would create some nice frameworks to working with this.
I’ll probably play around with some of this for the 4.1.0 release or this stuff is going to drive me crazy real fast.
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Posted by Paul Haddad
Tue, 14 Nov 2006 05:46:00 GMT
Yes I know another blog and a generic looking typo one at that. But people seem to like them and this one was fairly easy to setup.
So today marked the release of PTHPasteboard 4.0, after what seemed like a never ending process of getting everything polished, help written, bugs fixed, icons commissioned, etc..
I think the entire release came out rather well, the Syncing stuff is particularly useful if you switch between machines several times a day like I do. Its one of those features you almost don’t realize is there, but you miss it if its gone.
So now its on to release 4.1. I think the main things that’ll be added to that one are Japanese localization (though that might come in at 4.0.1), tweaks like deleting individual items from the Main window, customizing the toolbar, auto-update (as opposed to just checking) and what I hope will be a cool new way to select items to paste.
Feel free to comment if you find this blog actually useful. :^)
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