Diego's Rants » Apple / Macintosh

Download Thingy, still working on it but getting closer.

Diego Massanti — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:22:32 +0000

Some updates to the status of Download Thingy.

Even the fact that i dont have a lot of time lately, i’ve been working on it and I plan to release a prototype version to interested alpha testers soon.

What has been done:

Completely “in house” CoreFoundation based download engine.
Queues, downloads and segments are GCD (Grand Central Dispatch) driven now.
No more libCurl.
Custom “.thingy” container format for storage and sharing of file downloads (and some other things).

Keep an eye to this blog if you are interested to try this application or email me directly at diego (at sign here) massanti.com.

Cheers!

The all new 52″ Apple Cinema Display.

Diego Massanti — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:15:27 +0000

No words….

The new 52" HD Apple Cinema Display

Quirky error in Google Chrome for Mac (Beta)

Diego Massanti — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:59:01 +0000

While testing some of my own JavaScript code in the new beta build of Chrome for Mac, i was presented with this error:

Chrome for Mac error

Updated HE-AAC (aacPlus) reference encoder for Mac OS X

Diego Massanti — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:10:55 +0000

This is an updated build of the 3GPP group AAC Plus (or HE-AAC) reference audio encoder for Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” or newer.

You can get the binary build (3 way universal binary with PowerPC, i386 and x86_64 architectures) here:

enhAacPlusEnc for Mac OS X Leopard, Binary build with 3 architectures.

Xcode project (3.2 or newer) can be downloaded here:

enhAacPlusEnc Xcode project (3.2 or newer)

For more info visit the original post here.

Samsung 206NW ColorSync Color Profile for Mac OS X

Diego Massanti — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:29:21 +0000

Im just tired of having to recalibrate my LCD every time i re-install Mac OS X or just reset my user account, so im just saving here for my own use, a ColorSync profile for my Samsung 206NW displays.

If you happen to use a Samsung NW series LCD display with a Mac, feel free to give this profile a test. It is calibrated with Photo / Video editing in mind, that being said, the color temperature (white point) is “warmish”.

Cheers.

Instructions: Just unzip and move the .icc file inside /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays/

Open display preferences and select the new color profile.

Download Below:

SyncMaster 206NW Mac OS X ICC ColorSync Profile

Download Thingy, it slowly starts to make sense.

Diego Massanti — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:08:42 +0000

I have been working for the past days in the foundation for a new Download Manager that I’m writing for the Mac platform, and this is just an “status quo” about how things are evolving.

What is done so far.

A certainly modern multi-threaded Cocoa Framework implementation around libCurl‘s C API, which allows me to get my hands on the whole power of Curl, but without leaving the beauty of Objective-C and the Cocoa API’s at any moment.
A pretty basic prorotype kind of UI which allows simple segmented download of files for the time being.
Download Thingy, the prototype UI
A custom (and open, XML, standards based) file format baptized (you guessed) “.thingy” which takes care of storing partial download segments, some basic (for now) binary and redundancy checking, and of course, the ability to reconstruct itself into the original file.
A standard .thingy container.
Main Launch Services integartion is partially done too.
Some basic implementation of automatic mirror discovering.

What needs to be done.

I have to write the foundation for a proper queue management system.
Network Usage / Bandwidth Limiting logics are in the “to do” list too.
A proper User Interface.
A public alpha version with basic usability that people can start to use and report so i can accelerate the development based on actual user’s requests.
A Safari / WebKit plugin.

So far, this is looking pretty nice and i think it will become a pretty interesting utility for the Mac community.

Automatic build numbering increase with xCode

Diego Massanti — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 04:01:34 +0000

I had this problem some days ago where i wanted to automatically increase the build number of my Application in xCode, every time that i actually made a new build. xCode comes with a tool called agvtool which is supposed to fill this gap, but the main problem with this is that it needs the project to be actually closed, for some reason that i certainly ignore.

After some searches, i finished at this interesting post by Chris Hanson, but this was not exactly what i wanted to do, again, i wanted a simple approach to increase the build number with every build.

So this is what i did.

First I created a new configuration settings file in xCode, as shown below.

Creating a new Configuration Settings File in xCode

After this, i ended up with an empty configuration file, so i added the following inside it:

CURRENT_PROJECT_VERSION = 1

xCode uses this variable to store your application’s build number, so we are going to tell it to use this file in order to get the value for the CURRENT_PROJECT_VERSION variable.

Go to your target’s properties, be sure to select All configurations and All Settings, then base your target’s config in your newly created version.xcconfig file, and set the version variable to our new version variable as shown below:

Configuring the Target to use the new variable in the version.xcconfig file.

After all this is done, all you have to do is create a new “Run Script” build phase, and place the following inside it:

NEW_VERSION=`cat "$SRCROOT/version.xcconfig" | awk '/CURRENT_PROJECT_VERSION/ { print $3 + 1 }'`
sed -i '' "s/CURRENT_PROJECT_VERSION = .*/CURRENT_PROJECT_VERSION = $NEW_VERSION/" "$SRCROOT/version.xcconfig"
CURRENT_PROJECT_VERSION=$NEW_VERSION
touch "$SRCROOT/version.xcconfig"

Obviously, if you changed the file or variable names, you will have to adapt the script as needed.
Now, every time you build the app, the build number is automatically increased by one, and included in your application’s plist file as shown below:

Build number being shown in the built app.

A whole thanks goes to the guys at #macdev on freenode Diabolik and KonaBlend who helped with the bash scripting!

Download Thingy, a free Download Manager for the Mac

Diego Massanti — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:51:08 +0000

Im working in a new piece of software called “Download Thingy” (at least for now).

It is basically a Download Manager for Mac OS X. The main reasons why I am doing this are simple: There seems to be not a single Download Manager for the Mac that complies with the following:

It is Free.
It doesn’t have a lot of features that i will NEVER use.
Comes with a simple UI putting the main focus on the Downloads and not on other stuff I don’t care.
Allows segmented / multi threaded downloads.
Allows limiting the download speed in a “per download” or “overall” basis.

For this project I’m using the amazing libCurl library as the download engine backend.

Anybody who is interested to participate in a private alpha testing of this (yet prototype) app feel free to comment on this post and i will get back to you when an alpha version is ready for testing.

Cheers, Diego.

The digital certificate breakage

Diego Massanti — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:42:29 +0000

So um… some weeks ago I released a new version of MediaInfo Mac with several fixes on my own code, with also a newer build of the MediaInfo Lib by Jerome Martinez, and, finally, a newer version of Sparkle (the amazing framework that i use for the automated software updates).
To make a really long story very short, Sparkle changed an important behavior: Now each and every update that I release has to be signed with a digital certificate, which is nothing but good, because it gives an extra layer of security for the final users.
Bad news are that I totally missed that part in Sparkle’s release docs, so I released an update without the certificate, and from there on, users were stuck on that version without the possibility to update.
I still had the ability to show to the users a nice dialog informing them about my error and kindly asking to update manually, but even that, i still can see that a LOT of people is still using the broken version (0.7.7.58), which leads me to the following conclusion:
Most people will NOT upgrade their software unless the process is totally automatic and painless, not even users of MediaInfo which are usually over the “Average Joe”.

This can be seen on the usage statistics that i keep (which I did reset some hours ago btw, due to some preparations for the upcoming MediaInspector beta) where you can see that there are still a LOT of users stuck on 0.7.7.58.
So to sum things up:

If you are using Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, the latest version that you can use is 0.7.17.3, get it here.
If you are on Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” or newer, just get the latest version here.

Cheers!.

Diego.

Why the new tabs in Safari 4 are a shame…

Diego Massanti — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:44:13 +0000

So yesterday I downloaded the new Safari 4 beta release from Apple… and yes, it is faster, the new “top sites” feature is kinda “cool”, but I happen to see way too much “Chrome like” UI features here, specially, the new tabs design. Apple clearly wanted to imitate the tabs in Chrome, but they did it wrong, because, if you have 3 opened tabs and you want to reach the 3rd one, the distance between Tab 1 and Tab 3 is more than 2/3 of your screen (or more than 1000 pixels in most standard screens).

Die hard apple fanboys have told me things like “It’s just a matter of getting used to them” or “You have to use keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs”.

Well, let me tell you that i see no reason why i should “get used” to something that I don’t like at all, and let me also tell you that when I’m browsing the web, i usually DON’T use the keyboard at all which is why I’m blaming at the new tabs. Of course, thanks god you can switch back to the old tabs scheme, but right now, the preference is hidden, so i really hope that apple adds this as a standard preference for the final release.

Anyway, a video is better than a thousand words.

Last minute note…. while editing this post, i found that Safari 4 breaks the Rich Text Editor in WordPress, but since it is yet a beta, i guess it’s ok.