There are times when (a) I'd rather use a Terminal shell to search for something, or it's already where I am, and (b) when I'm in the mood to write a little set of scripts to do something neat. And so it came that I wrote a set of little scripts to keep track of my completely out-of-control PDF collection from various journals. This isn't a blog article about how you should use this tool, since your reading neuroses probably differ, but just a quick "hey, I think this is neat" and something that may inspire someone on to other cool command-line tools (or whatnot). [Read more…]

I just wanted document somewhere on the internet unprefixed object names in the Objective-C runtime that could potentially trip you up. I'm just talking about capitalized words, not C keywords, and I'm not talking about anything already given a namespace prefix like the NS* types.

There are un-prefixed, capitalized type names lurking in the runtime. [Read more…]

There are many ways to think through the flow of a program, and times when certain constructs like switch statements are a nice option, even in a language with no syntactical support for it, per se. Philippe Mougin was discussing just such options in F-Script back in the Oughts. I had a need for switching in F-Script, and came up with a few versions that I found useful. [Read more…]

And I'll even be speaking at it, together with the mighty Joe Pezzillo of Metafy and Push IO fame (and all-around good guy). We're giving a talk on the subject of open source on the iPhone. If there are specific points that you would like us to address, feel free to leave a note and I'll take it all into consideration. If you're there, please be sure to say hi. Please consider going if you've never been! It's more intimate than the larger WWDC. The Mac/iPhone dev community is great, and this should be a very fun conference.

360iDev — "the Premier iPhone developer conference" (April 11-14)

Here's a tiny adjustment to Xcode that made me happy. Using the app-specific keyboard shortcuts (System Preferences » Keyboard » Keyboard Shortcuts » Application Shortcuts) to make your workflow a touch quicker / more convenient. If you have a smaller keyboard, the key combos get more cramped and hard to remember, but I was just noticing how unused these higher function keys generally are. I'm sure you can suggest even better helpers. Of course, season to taste. [Read more…]

This is just a quick hack example using F-Scirpt to add a feature to WriteRoom that isn't currently implemented. It's just one Cocoa API call away from doing what I want. This is not a permanent fix to my problem, but I thought it was neat enough to show others how F-Script can at least let you do little things quickly like this for those unfamiliar. [Read more…]

With things running smoothly with my SciPy setup, I have been having fun trying out new libraries. Here's just a short list of some that I have been playing with. [Read more…]