Tap Tempo - Playing with Dashboard

I finally upgraded my laptop to Tiger right before WWDC, since I was helping with the student Sunday sessions and I figured I should at least _look_ at CoreData before people asked me questions about it. I spent most of my time helping people in the "Intro to Cocoa" session, so it didn't matter that much in the end...

Before installing I'd been looking forward to using Spotlight the most, but I've been pleasantly surprised by Dashboard. I haven't used the standard-Dashboard-demo widgets too much, but here are a few that I've used quite a bit:

• Air Traffic Control - for finding wireless networks. More for fun than anything else...
• iTunesLyrics - a great example of something that accesses the web, but that is more than just a cover to a search site. It gets the lyrics for the current song playing in iTunes (yeah, I know, you probably figured that out from the name already)
• Package Tracker - shows off another feature of dashboard - allowing you to have multiple copies, tracking different packages. I used to track this in my RSS aggregator, but this is a much better solution.

This week I finally broke down and started a dashboard widget, since I had an idea for one and naively thought it wouldn't be _that_ hard. It's tentatively called "Tap Tempo", and it's for... um... tapping... the tempo... of things (I'm Captain Obvious tonight). When dealing with music for Fremont I often need to know the tempo of a piece, and my $100+ metronome with that function isn't always nearby. Of course my computer always is, and the math isn't hard, so how hard can the html/javascript/css stuff be anyway? Heh...

So a few days later I finally have something that works. It has buttons, preferences, does the fancy flip, background image, etc. Well, it has the background image from the widget sample code :) And... the button is the icon from the sample code :) But hey, it works right? Hopefully I can convince Lisa to draw up something pretty so I can stop hanging my head in shame.

Here's an image for you - I'll get the real thing posted once I clean up the UI some more:


Ohhhhh soooo cheesy :)

I've been getting by with Javascript examples from an old 'jack-of-all-trades' web book and searching on google when necessary. I've been building up more links on my del.icio.us page if you ever need to find some. It's been kinda frustrating figuring out the language works (and how it interacts with html/css, etc) - I realized that I've been spoiled working in Objective-C for the past 5 years. But I really miss the development environment the most (never thought I'd say that :). Debugging using alert() to substitute for gdb or even NSLog()s is no fun - it throws a modal alert onscreen whenever you want to see something, which was recommended by one site (is there a 'print to console' equivalent?). And I miss having a compiler to warn me that I forgot a semicolon, assigned a value instead of testing for equality in an if statement, or that I typed 'val' instead of 'var', so it thinks I'm using some class instead of creating a variable - yes, all of these happened :(. I also managed to forget to add 'break' lines to cases in a switch statement, which is only interesting to me since I did the same thing 10 years ago when I was first learning C.

All in all, not the greatest week for my programming skills, but I know more about the languages now, and like I said - it works :)

But it's still ugly. For now.

Switched to NetNewsWire

After a couple of years of looking at all my feeds online, I have finally made the switch to NNW. The bloglines integration from v2 made it really simple for me to bring all of my feeds over, but it still took some effort to convince me.

I grabbed the demo version about a month ago and got it working, but I kept looking at everything on bloglines without really thinking about it. I decided that I would do everything in NNW for a week, to give it a fair try - and I haven't viewed anything on bloglines since :)

The Good

• Bloglines would get really slow sometimes, and at times it made me remember "oh, I'm looking at all of this on a web page". NNW gets rid of that feeling for the most part
• It's nice to have access to articles when I'm not online (it was very nice on CalTrain during WWDC), and to search previous entries without having to do extra work
• being able to share my subscriptions with bloglines and/or between machines is great
• the diff'ing feature is so much fun! It's interesting to see how some of the more "out there" statements get brought back in line over time :) It also stops me from wondering why I'm seeing an old headline again

The Not-Quite-As-Good

• Doing things with tabs takes FOREVER after the app has been running a while (clicking, closing, switching; it will sometimes take 10 seconds for the app to respond - I've accidently closed lots of tabs this way) - looking at the bug DB, other people have reported this as 1855 and 1857, so I'm not alone. It just means I have to quit and relaunch the app every day or two, so it's not the end of the world. Much better than crashing, which is what tends to happen to browsers after a while :)
• Browser scripts - I have a number of scripts for things I do in the browser - 'add to bloglines' and 'add to del.icio.us', etc; that I don't have access to in NNW. There's probably a way that I haven't found yet, but for now I just have to open the page in Safari to use them...
• Other browser things that don't always work - sometimes javascript popups or other plugins within a web page have trouble within NNW. Again, I just open the page in Safari and it's fine.
• Although NNW does a really good job with it's outline view, I just don't like how that type of view works in general. There's probably a bigger design post about this to come...
• As they mention in the help documentation, the bloglines support is pretty simple right now - there's no automatic way to add a NNW subscription back into bloglines, for example. I need to send them some notes on this...

I really don't have a list of "The Bad", which just shows off the quality of NNW. I'm really happy that I made the switch, and now I can go be the annoying guy asking them for new features :)

6 songs

from catching the blog virus from Daisie - here's some of the music I've been listening to of late:

Shostakovich - 5th symphony - (3) Allegro non troppo

this is our fall show for marching band this year, by my favorite composer.

Basement Jaxx - Rooty - Romeo

I've been listening to more Basement Jaxx lately - Rooty and Remedy are pretty good, I'm not so wild about Kish Kash...

Charles Ives - Country Band March

our music from this past winter season. One of the strangest "standard" pieces of music I've ever seen - it was fun and challenging to work on for the season.

Fatboy Slim - Wonderful Night

I had to grab this after hearing it a million times in the background at NAB. Good stuff.

Freezepop - Science Genius Girl

Lisa and I played a little bit of Amplitude this weekend, and I remembered how much I like the songs from it and Frequency. The Freezepop songs they have in the games work really well, but I'm not as impressed when looking at their stuff elsewhere. The freezepop website has mp3's and videos that actually make me a little less impressed with them... but still, this song is cool :)

Beck - Guero - E-Pro

A great album with lots of great songs.

And of course you can find all of these on Amazon, but you don't get the fancy iTunes previews...


Update: I forgot to spread the virus :) Let's hear from the old college crew: Scott, Matt, Wade, Will, and Travis

June 12, 2000

Today is my 5th anniversary at Apple, so for some reason I was compelled to ride my bike in and do some stuff (remember, 'today' is Sunday). There's probably a longer post in me somewhere talking about all of the changes this little Iowa boy has gone through since then, but I got more sun than usual today, which means I'm gonna get sleep, and you get nothing more. Enjoy :)