Echographia

After the Barefoot site launched, I got a lot of nice feedback about it, mostly from people who work for the cafe.  “Looks great!” they said, and I wasn’t quite sure how to react.  I was proud of how the site worked, but the look of the site, I thought, was entirely thanks to Conrad Altmann, the designer.

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Here’s a simpler version of that last post using Rich Kilmer’s HotCocoa library. I also use the approach I suggested at the end of the last post: Build a menu each time it’s requested, instead of trying to keep one at the ready.
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I’ve been wanting to write a Mac application since I got this computer a year or so ago. Still haven’t, but today I ran through a MacRuby/Cocoa tutorial, and I’m hoping to find the time to code the app I have in mind soon, before I forget whatever I just learned. More about that if it happens.

My original plan was to make the app accessible from the global menu bar, but then I learned that Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines discourage it, and you know how I love guidelines. And humans. So instead I’m going to use a Dock menu. The main advantage of both, for my purposes, is that after you take some action, control returns immediately to whatever application you were using; perfect for programs you use for a moment now and then, but don’t really spend time in.

Anyway, I thought I’d share what I learned about implementing Dock menus in MacRuby. (more…)

Yesterday was the first day of February Album Writing Month, so of course I kicked things off by sinking three hours into writing a script that I could have found on the Internet somewhere. See, last week I cleaned out my GMail inbox. Since I haven’t done that, like, ever, that meant reading a lot of old and unimportant mail – like, for example, the July 2008 DreamHost newsletter, which mentioned their Entire Account Backup service, which gives you a downloadable copy of all your data for a given account. I love backups, so in the interest of being able to archive that newsletter, I kicked off a backup right then and there.
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