FernyB

I recently wrote an app called RailsMailPreview which will capture any emails being sent from your Rails app.
Once they are captured you can preview what they will look like to the end user.

It is available for purchase from the Mac App Store:
http://nufex.com/link/rails-mail-preview

In the past years I’ve always tried to use MacVIM but I just couldn’t keep with it because for one it didn’t look great and I had grown to like Textmate. Recently I decided to get back into learning and use MacVIM for all my development needs except for Cocoa Development where I use XCode because it works awesome with it. I think it has taken me about a week to start getting used to it, the only problems I have at the moment are, I will sometimes type the wrong command but it’s getting better. Practice makes perfect so I will keep trying.

When I test my iOS apps on my local network to debug issues I setup a host on my router to point my mac on the network. On my development machine I port forward all requests from port 80 to port 3000 because I’m using Rails and want to view the request log.

This is what I used to forward port 80 to 3000.

In the current project that I’m working on I wanted to give the user the ability to add an email to their address book.

The thing I wanted the user to see was AddressBook.app open and show the current person’s email in edit mode.

The way I did that was like so:

Yes that’s me the first blurry one. Photo by Chuck Toporek.

After attending NSConference USA 2010 in Atlanta, GA all I have to say it was awesome! Really it was. The content was great. The folks were cool and the food was ok not bad. One thing that I really did not like and I think everyone would agree, food was not allowed in the auditorium. I’ve managed to record a few of the talks using QuickTime on my Macbook. I think one of the best talks was “Spelunking OSX” it’s just awesome. The lunch talks were also great. The Cocoa Rumble was really great and entertaining. Hopefully next year it will be at a different city, I have nothing against Atlanta but having a conference in different cities will be great.

Atlas is like Xcode. Atlas is built with Cappuccino and Cappuccino is built using a language called Objective-J which is just a superset of JavaScript and its very cool! Just like Objective-C is a superset of C. The best thing I like about it is that it’s so much like Cocoa and Objective-C. The syntax is almost the same, NSObject would be CPObject.

280 North makes Atlas and I signed up for their beta program from beta version 3. Once I had access I played with it but didn’t do much. Now just yesterday I got interested in it again and while reading the forums to see what people where saying I saw a tutorial that caught my interest ( http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/11/280-atlas-introductory-screencast/ ) and I decided to write a simple app as-well.

I wrote a simple calculator to calculate the tax of an item but my goal was to find out if NSNotification was being supported and well, it is being supported of course it’s not called NSNotification but called CPNotification. In Objective-J ALL classes are prefixed with CP instead of NS. Here is my source code for the app I wrote using Atlas.

To learn more about Atlas go to their site and read about it and of course try it out!

Francisco Tolmasky – FOWA Maimi 2009 from Carsonified on Vimeo.

NSConference 2010 (USA) just opened up for registration and I just completed registering for the iPhone Developer Sessions and Mac Developer Sessions which makes that a 3 day conference for me. It will held in Atlanta, Georgia at Georgia Tech Research Institute from Sunday, February 21 through Tuesday, February 23, 2010.

This will be my very first Mac Developer conference and I’m really not sure what to expect but the quotes from last years conference sound great. One thing I do expect is for Wifi not to work and to not expect any meat for food which happened at other conferences I’ve been to. Considering I have only been to two other ones. Hopefully that will not be the case and they will have meat! I guess I will find out when I get there…

Register to NSConference 2010 only 200 spots will be available so do it early.

So, it’s been while since I last wrote something here.. Well it’s for a good reason, I’ve been busy with work but besides the work hours, I actually managed to create a PHP Framework which I call Cupcake. The reason for the name is being that I wanted a version of CakePHP without lots of the component I will never use. I initially forked CakePHP but ran into some issues with it. So I decided to write my own and implement it that way I thought it should be. That is available on Github.

Another project I’m working on is a Mac OS X Application that will be similar to my previous apps GAMV and LyFOX which were a great success, and I will attempt to release it by the end of this year 2009.

This weekend as I wait for Apple’s response to my iPhone App being accepted or rejected. I’ve been wanted to create an Adium Plugin for a while, so now I took the initial steps and made it much easier to begin. I have created a XCode Template for creating your own Adium Plugins.

It can be downloaded over at my github reposity. 
http://github.com/fernyb/adiumplugin/tree/master

Installation

• Make sure you have the following directory:~/cocoa

If you do not have that directory create it and navigate to it.

• Make sure to download the Adium source code into the ~/cocoa directory. You will need to use mercurial
  hg clone http://hg.adiumx.com/adium
• Make sure you have the following directory.
  “/Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Project Templates/Adium/Plugin”

If that does not exist make sure to create it.

• Download or clone the git repository:
  git clone git://github.com/fernyb/adiumplugin.git

Copy all files from git repository and place them in:
“/Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Project Templates/Adium/Plugin”

• Launch XCode and create new project. On the left side under User Templates you should have a new entry for selecting Adium and selecting Plugin to create.
• That is it.

So, I got this flash back and it reminded me of my first computer I’ve ever had and how I wanted one. I was 8 years old and as most kids do on weekend mornings watch cartoons, I somehow was watching a commercial for the Macintosh Performa and I guess it just made me think It would be cool to have one.

So I thought about those commercials perhaps I can find them online and so I did. Here there are in parts.

Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdqe5fu8A30

Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSqQCiSesy8

Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAgku3vFFHA

Part 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbe0IVtT3VQ

Part 5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXv8Ysf9WCs

Part 6:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfD5Ut1WWOo

Lately, I’ve learned how to use GDB with XCode and it’s awesome! It really saves your lots of time debugging an app. I was having lots of trouble trying to figure out why an instance variable was not retaining it’s value in a new method.
Well, it happen to be I was using a UITableViewDelegate and those methods where being called before my setter method and so the instance variable was nil, the only way I found this out was by using GDB and believe me NSLog for debugging is not always going to work.

It’s been a few months now and I’ve been listening to the podcasts from Mac Developer Network (MDN). The podcasts I like to listen to are the Developer Lives because they provide an insight how they got started. They also have other podcasts which are all good like Mac Developer Roundtable and Late Night Cocoa. Take a listen to them. They are good.

Today, I wanted to make a screencast to serve more as a reminder to myself on remembering how to create the UINavigation inside a UITabBar for iPhone Development. So I got a little cheap and I decided to look for something online to bookmark but I found screencast-o-matic which is really cool. It let’s you create screencasts from your browser. It uses a java applet. So this is what I created.

Lately I’ve been writing Objective-C/Cocoa code, and lately I’ve learned how-to capture video from an iSight on a Macbook. It’s actually easy. Here is the code. and I’ve also attached the example application I was writing so you can take a look at it.

[Download Source]
[Download Application]

#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
#import <QTKit/QTKit.h>


@interface MyRecorderController : NSObject {
  IBOutlet QTCaptureView * mCaptureView;
  QTCaptureSession       * mCaptureSession;
  QTCaptureDeviceInput   * mCaptureDeviceInput;
}

- (IBAction)startRecording: (id)sender;
- (IBAction)stopRecording: (id)sender;

@end



@implementation MyRecorderController

- (IBAction)startRecording: (id)sender
{
  // Create a new Capture Session
  mCaptureSession = [[QTCaptureSession alloc] init]; 
  
  //Connect inputs and outputs to the session
  BOOL success = NO;
  NSError *error;
  
  // Find a video device
  QTCaptureDevice *device = [QTCaptureDevice defaultInputDeviceWithMediaType:QTMediaTypeVideo];
  if(device) {
    success = [device open:&error];
    if(!success) {
      // Handle Error!
    }
    // Add the video device to the session as device input
    mCaptureDeviceInput = [[QTCaptureDeviceInput alloc] initWithDevice:device];
    success = [mCaptureSession addInput:mCaptureDeviceInput error:&error];
    if(!success) {
      // Handle error
    }
    
    // Associate the capture view in the UI with the session
    [mCaptureView setCaptureSession:mCaptureSession];
    
    // Start the capture session runing
    [mCaptureSession startRunning];
    
  } // End if device
}

- (IBAction)stopRecording: (id)sender
{
  if([mCaptureSession isRunning]) {
     [mCaptureSession stopRunning];
     [mCaptureSession release];
     [mCaptureDeviceInput release];
  }
}


@end

The the last two weeks, I’ve been writing an application with RubyCocoa. I do whatever I can for the day considering I have a day job. Here is my first UI mock.