Sugar Maple Software

As I previously mentioned, I hope to give something back to the Mac development community that is so supportive. In that spirit, I’m releasing the Perl script, under the MIT license, that I use export NewsHawker. I have learned, at times the hard way, that every build that you give to others must be traceable and reproducible. That is, you must be able to determine easily exactly which software someone has on their computer and you must be able to recreate that exact software. This is critical when supporting customers or debugging issues. …

This was initially sent to the macsb mailing list. A couple of people suggested I post it here as well. It’s the same other than the addition of some links to previous posts.

I thought I’d share a couple of thoughts that may be of interest to those macsb folks in a similar situation. First, I decided that NewsHawker would be my first app because it met two criteria previously mentioned on this list: one, it is an app that does something I personally want (which provides motivation) and, two, its implementation isn’t too complicated (which results in a greater chance of actually releasing). I’m relieved that I didn’t start with a more complicated application since the effort required to reach beta is more than I expected and the amount of time I have been able to dedicate is less than I had hoped. It seems like other commitments often trumps my development efforts. …

NewsHawker, the first application from Sugar Maple Software, has recently reached beta.

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Do you spill your breakfast cereal on your keyboard or yourself while trying to eat and read your news at the same time? Does your keyboard get sticky from your dirty fingers as you eat pizza and advance to the next news item in your news reader? If so, NewsHawker can help you read more news while keeping your keyboard clean.

NewsHawker reads you your news so you can focus on other tasks. NewsHawker extends the functionality of NetNewsWire to speak the news items in NetNewsWire. NewsHawker is configurable. Do you want to read just the headlines of the news items? No problem. Just the bodies? Sure. Read the bodies of some items as their headlines are being read? Certainly. Open certain items in your browser if they sound interesting? Of course. …

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.

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. …

I recently wrote my first draft of documentation for my upcoming application. Integrating this documentation into Apple Help was much easier than I expected. The Apple Help Viewer simply displays HTML files. More impressively, cascading style sheets (CSS) are supported. I hope this will allow me to share the identical HTML files between my application and the support section of my web site and simply have different CSS files for each. …

IronCoder 4 is over. Congratulations to Jonathan Wight for winning. His SpaceCam application is quite impressive. Thanks to Mark Dalrymple for choosing a cool theme (space) and API (Core Image) and judging the competition. Thanks to all the IronCoders for participating.

I wanted to programatically open a URL in the associated application. I started in Xcode’s Developer Documentation and searched for openURL which seemed like a good method name. I found the NSWorkspace class’ openURL method. I love it when that happens. One line of code later and I was opening URLs.

I’ve been trying to clear my plate for this weekend so I can participate in IronCoder 4. Since I work best under pressure, this is a great way for me to expand and refine my Cocoa skills.

If you are interested, you can learn more on the IronCoder website and the #macsb IRC channel. (Yes, IRC. Until this week, I probably hadn’t used IRC since 1992. If you are in a similar position, don’t worry; the clients are much better now. Freenode’s FAQ was helpful in figuring out how to register my nick.)

My honeymoon with Cocoa lasted about two weeks before I found myself having to invoke a Carbon API since the Cocoa one didn’t support the features I wanted. I wanted my application to speak some text, but I wanted to configure various speech-related properties. The NSSpeechSynthesizer class is extremely easy to use, but doesn’t provide access to any speech-related property other than the voice. So, I was off to read up on the Speech Synthesis Manager (which I remember as just the Speech Manager). While I think it would be great if NSSpeechSynthesizer exposed all of the features available in the Speech Synthesis Manager, I’m not going to rake another Carbon library over the coals; that’s already been done quite well. Instead, I’m going to share the problems I encountered and the solutions I found when integrating the Speech Synthesis Manager into my Cocoa application.