Sugar Maple Software » apple

NewsHawker 1.1 Released

geoff — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:52:10 +0000

NewsHawker 1.1 has been released! The most important change is that NewsHawker is now compatible with the latest version of NetNewsWire and Mac OS X 10.6. NewsHawker now requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later. Other minor changes are enumerated in the release notes. As always, [...]

uDecide! for iPhone Released!

geoff — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:04:32 +0000

uDecide! for iPhone® has been approved for sale. uDecide! is US$0.99 (price varies in other countries) and can be purchased on the App Store℠ (click here). uDecide! … because the important decisions are hard enough. uDecide! helps you make decisions or answers questions. Some decisions are rather broad; [...]

A Marvel: iPhone Development Environment

geoff — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:16:11 +0000

Well, school is out for the summer and, while I still have plenty to do to prepare for teaching in the Fall, I have some time to focus on Sugar Maple Software. I’ve downloaded the iPhone SDK, upgraded Xcode, started the Perforce server process, bought the third edition of Aaron [...]

Two Months with Leopard

geoff — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 05:58:11 +0000

I'm much too busy to publish my initial impressions of Leopard in a timely manner; so, instead, I'm publishing my thoughts after two months of living with the big cat. I'm going to cover a number of different aspects of Leopard, some major and some minor. I'll start with the upgrade and a litany of issues and then comment on some surprises, both positive and negative.

A Warm Welcome to Alex

geoff — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 02:32:00 +0000

As a regular users of NewsHawker, one of my favorite features in Leopard is Alex:

Meet Alex â€” a new English male voice that uses advanced, patented Apple technologies to deliver natural breathing and intonation, even at fast speaking rates.

Alex sounds great when reading feeds at high speaking rates.

If you've tried NewsHawker before but didn't like the sound of the voice in Tiger, if you've now installed Leopard, it's time to give NewsHawker another try with Alex. If you haven't tried NewsHawker yet but have installed Leopard, now is a great time.

Apple Remote Support

geoff — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:50:59 +0000

The most requested feature for NewsHawker is support for the Apple Remote. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't provide a public API for this. I considered only supporting the Apple Remote through third-party applications such as Sofa Control and Remote Buddy. However, once I found Martin Kahr's Apple Remote Controller Wrapper Class, I decided to integrate support directly in NewsHawker. ...

Helping Myself

geoff — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 03:03:00 +0000

As I've mentioned before, mailing lists are an excellent resource when looking for answers to your development questions. This is especially the case of the mailing lists hosted by Apple (at least those to which I subscribe). I frequently take advantage of this resource and also try to contribute. Often, I don't have the answer or someone, who checks their mail much more frequently than I, has already answered the question, but, when the opportunity is there, I take the time to help. A couple of days ago, when I couldn't remember the kernel equivalent of the gettimeofday function, I searched the Apple Mailing Lists and immediately found the answer (clock_get_calendar_value which lead me to kern/clock.h and the currently supported function clock_get_calendar_microtime). The signature of the reply to the original poster's question caught my eye. It was mine. I had provided the answer exactly two years ago today. It's like something out of a Sci-Fi movie... or maybe just good karma.

Strip HTML Tags

geoff — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 16:01:18 +0000

I needed to convert HTML to plain text for the application that I'm developing. I figured someone else had done this before; so, I searched for a solution. I found one that leveraged WebKit and worked well but was too slow for my usage. I found another that leveraged libxml2 and was fast but crashed. In the end, and only because I could browse the source to the version of libxml2 included in Mac OS X, I was able to work around the crash and keep the faster solution. ...

Kernel Logging

geoff — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 19:47:46 +0000

While I usually write about programming in the land of milk and honey (i.e., Cocoa), I spent most of the previous ten years writing kernel-level code. Recently, I've ventured back into the kernel and was reminded of the challenge of logging from an I/O Kit driver. When writing code in the kernel for an I/O Kit driver, you can't invoke printf to log messages. Instead, you usually invoke IOLog. ...

Leopard Tech Talk in Chicago

geoff — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 14:17:19 +0000

I received confirmation from Apple that I may attend the Mac OS X Leopard Tech Talk in Chicago on 13 December. Since I missed WWDC this past summer and don't have an ADC Select or Premier membership this year, I'm really looking forward to learning more about Leopard. ...