Open Kosmaczewski

I’m sure the pun between the acronym for “NeXT Interface Builder” and this definition of “cocoa beans” is intentional, but it surprised me anyway:

A watch might be one of the most common types of objects, but it remains also one of the earliest pieces of human craftmanship to show an extreme level of complexity, all contained in a small amount of space. Since the late 1700s, artisan watchmakers in Switzerland and elsewhere have shown their pride and skills [...]

(Highly geeky post ahead. You’ve been warned!)
I have found the very message that summarizes the beauty of Cocoa in a single word; see by yourselves, hereunder in line 47:

#import

// The interface of a person
@interface Person : NSObject {
NSString* firstName;
NSString* lastName;
int age;
}
@end

// The [...]

This is an evening project that turned out to be really cool. Let’s say that you’re a Macromedia Flash designer, and your clients ask you to bundle your nice Flash movie as a screen saver. What to do? For Windows there are free utilities to convert a SWF into a screen saver, but not for [...]

Version: 1.0
Author: Adrian Kosmaczewski
Date: March 18th, 2008
Programming Languages: Objective-C
Tools: Xcode, PackageMaker
Platforms: Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” and 10.5 “Leopard” (PowerPC & Intel)
Downloads: FlashSaver Installer and Source Code.
Licence: MIT License
The FlashSaver is a Universal Binary screen saver that loads an HTML page, itself loading a Flash movie inside. The whole is bundled as an installer, [...]

Version: 1.0
Author: Adrian Kosmaczewski
Date: November 2003
Programming Languages: Objective-C
Tools: Project Builder
Platforms: Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar” (PowerPC)
Download: fixtup.zip
License: None, public domain, whatever you want :)
FixTuP is a highly experimental FTP client that I wrote while learning Objective-C and Cocoa under Jaguar. It wraps the command line FTP application bundled with Jaguar, and parses the [...]

(Article publié sur Profession-Web)

Il y a de moments clés dans l’histoire de la technologie. Hier soir, vers 18h (heure suisse), il s’est produit l’un de ces moments. Apple a dévoilé un SDK (Software Development Kit) pour l’iPhone, et le monde du développement logiciel mobile ne sera plus jamais le même. Voici pourquoi.

There’s an interesting discussion going on these days on Ruby blogs about, basically, how to avoid one of the most common, annoying, easy-to-create bugs in any programming language: calling a method on a null reference (or pointer, depending on your language).

This single issue happens all the time, in garbage-collected and non-managed languages, static and dynamic, [...]

Lately I got curious to know how could I grab the entire desktop of my computer, and save it into a file, or display it into an NSImageView component. I started to look around on the web and discovered that:

There’s no direct support for that in Cocoa
There’s a lot of different ways to do it, [...]

Version: 1.0
Author: Adrian Kosmaczewski
Date: January 27th, 2007
Programming Languages: Objective-C
Tools: Xcode
Platforms: Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” (PowerPC & Intel)
Downloads: Universal Binary and source code
Licence: Creative Commons Public Domain
This application shows how to programatically grab screenshots on a Mac using several technologies:

QuickDraw
OpenGL
Quartz
Some weird window hack, that doesn’t work for me :(
Using an NSTask wrapping [...]