Not an artist

Objective C for Max 5

niklas — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:26:35 +0000

I bought my upgrade of Max 5 yesterday, and I’m of course eagerly waiting for my license code. Trying to put Objective-C and Cocoa into all that I do, I found Rémy Muller’s blogpost about writing Objective-C externals for Max. Also, Electrotap has posted ObjectiveMax on Google Code. It’s dual-licensed GPL/Commercial which of course make BSD licensed code and closed-source-but-free a non-option. I’ll probably try out both and port much of my Java stuff over to have it working at greater speed and tested with Max 5

On the same page, Rémy writes about Bonjour for Max/MSP, and with my iPhone development efforts such as Lighting Matrix I’m planning on implementing a Bonjour interface as an option to UDP. (I’d also like to try out bluetooth just like the Wii interface aka.wiiremote, but that’s not a near-future plan as I’m not sure it’s supported through the official SDK yet)

Lighting Matrix for Max

niklas — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:08:00 +0000

I’m still a Max/MSP junkie (Max 5 was released today!!) and so I’m happy to present my new interface for Max: LightingMatrix

As you can see, LightingMatrix is a matrix of black buttons that light up when you press them and then fade down. When I get my certificate and get to put it on the iTunes App Store, you’ll see that you can use multiple fingers. The values are sent via UDP to Max where you can use it just like any other control. I look forward to seeing what splendid software-synth, lighting, moving robot or other fun stuff you’re going to be making with this. The power of tapping with many fingers is available, now also for Max/MSP (and Jitter)

“Unknown architecture” with iPhone development

niklas — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:20:42 +0000

Every now and again I get “Unknown architecture” when trying to compile. I found this post that has the solution in the bottom:

From the “Project” menu, choose Edit Active Target “ “. Select the “Build” tab. In the search box, look for FRAMEWORK_SEARCH_PATH. Highlight the row with a search path in it. Press to completely wipe out the path.

I don’t know quite why there sometimes are more paths there that I don’t want, but it helps anyways.

DashBoard

niklas — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:00:09 +0000

It’s been a while since I wrote about what I’m doing, but nothing much has changed: I’m working with the iPhone SDK making different applications. Today I’d like to demo the application that made me start working with the iPhone: DashBoard. I first got interested with dashboards when I tried to make something userfriendly with Performance Point and found IMA’s dashboard. Now I’ve created a simple, easily customizable dashboard for the iPhone. Because of Apple’s NDA I cannot release it, but I believe I can show it to you, running on the simulator:

In this video you see a logo on top and nine KPI buttons below. Each KPI button has a logo, a number, a unit, a last-updated date and a colour to indicate if it’s as it should be, falling below target or significantly below target (in other words, if there is a problem), using green, yellow and red. When you tap a KPI button, the report is displayed. The report is just a webpage, so I’ve linked up a webpage for every KPI button showing just a normal webpage, but more interestingly I think: PDF reports. As you can see, it works beautiful with 154 page reports, even though I guess for actually using this, you’d use a page or three with lots of graphs.

PS, yes, my conservatory exam preparations are going well

Debugging Cocoa

niklas — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:34:51 +0000

Debugging Autorelease is a great wiki entry at CocoaDev. EXC_BAD_ACCESS, meaning accessing an object you’ve already released (most likely) or have not yet instantiated (it happens) isn’t that fun to debug. Luckily, the NSZombie environment variable works when developing for iPhone as well, and I could find the error that had cost me most of my day. Yay! Other good resources for debugging are Debugging Techniques and Mac OS X Debugging Magic

The iPhone shortage

niklas — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:55:47 +0000

The mac world is high on expectations because of what is apparently a shortage of iPhones. New version coming up soon? Yes, probably. People hope for a 3G version. I hope for one too. I expect it to be announced in June and available end August. People think of a 32gb version. Sounds logical. But didn’t people notice Intel’s announcement of their Atom processor? Here’s ZDNet’s take on it. I would expect this to mean that an iPhone based on this architecture would be launched, perhaps silently even. Just a bit more horse power, very fitting for iPhone OS 2.0. Perhaps with a 32gb option. But still EDGE, no 3G. Then a 32gb version with 3G could be announced in June and become widely available in august.

NASA cuts Spirit

niklas — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:49:11 +0000

It’s all over the news: due to budget problems, NASA puts Spirit into hibernation and cuts back on the activity for Opportunity. Where do I sign the protest list?!

No atos(1) in the iPhone dev kit?

niklas — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:36:49 +0000

One thing I love about Java development is the ease of finding bugs through stack traces. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Cocoa likes being so verbose about it, it prefers just giving memory addresses to the function. CocoaDev has a nice article about how to add this that’s based on Apple’s documentation, but it requires /usr/bin/atos that I cannot find in the iPhone SDK. That doesn’t mean it’s not installed, but at this time I have no way of knowing that it is. I have no idea how I should let people beta-test my products and sending automatically back intelligent bug reports without this tool. Ok, I have no idea on how Apple plans to allow for betatesting applications if the AppStore is the only application distribution method, and I have no idea how people do this otherwise as atos(1) isn’t included with the default OS X system either. But I would really, really like to include stack traces with bugreports from beta testers.

Exception handling in Cocoa

niklas — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:48:28 +0000

Being fairly new to Cocoa I enjoyed reading O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter’s article on exception handling with Cocoa.

Getting info on private Cocoa frameworks

niklas — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:04:33 +0000

class-dump is a great tool for getting information about how private frameworks work that you may want to use. For example, iPhotoAccess.framework gave among other classes the following:
@interface Base64 : NSObject { }


+ (id)stringForBase64:(id)fp8;

+ (id)base64ForString:(id)fp8;

@end