Plugin Updates RSS Feed
Apple
Step into Xcode
March 11 2006 , 19:10
I love collecting programming books but sadly on the mac most of them are either fairly obtuse, or try to hard to be funny (but really aren't) These two are the Crown Jems of beginning mac programming.
The Author keeps a nice weblog here which so far makes good reading.
My favorite tip so far out of this book? Accessorizer, Makes some of the tedious parts of Mac OSX development in Objective C go away.. Wish I had know about this 6 months ago!
|
Why I'm now a Mac guy, part 1
February 18 2006 , 14:25
I had never touched a mac in my life until April
of 2005. This is an example of why I love this
platform so much
We're in Monterey this weekend (well technically Pacific Grove) and it's kind of Rainy & Cold. I had a few moments to myself and decided to dig into Quartz Composer to see what all the fuss was about.
Within 30 minutes I had taken a picture from our Aquarium visit this morning and converted it into this 68kb movie
It's not that I think the movie is so great, it's the ease at which I created the effect and the size (68kb!)-- OSX is really a tremendous operating system that has so much power integrated into it's core that Apple makes easy to use (Again, 30 minutes to generate from a dead start... I could do a new one in about 20 seconds now that I 'get it')
It got me wondering... Is there any value in integrating something like this in some fashion with RW? A few obvious ideas are perhaps an easy way to generate animated graphics or buttons but I could also see Quartz Compositions as a way to do picture or text effects easily.
Best of all? If done properly once the base framework was in place, it could be 'open' in that anyone could create new effects to add and share in an open community way (imagine this.. the current image inspector allows you to scale the image, flip it and rotate it... Imagine if you could transform it in dozens of ways including shadows, borders, etc. and imagine if you could create custom effects to add to the library built into RW using Quartz Composer)
In reality this kind of functionality needs to reside in the core RW product not a plugin so I doubt I'll ever do anything with it but it's so intriguing it really makes me think of all the possibilities.
We're in Monterey this weekend (well technically Pacific Grove) and it's kind of Rainy & Cold. I had a few moments to myself and decided to dig into Quartz Composer to see what all the fuss was about.
Within 30 minutes I had taken a picture from our Aquarium visit this morning and converted it into this 68kb movie
It's not that I think the movie is so great, it's the ease at which I created the effect and the size (68kb!)-- OSX is really a tremendous operating system that has so much power integrated into it's core that Apple makes easy to use (Again, 30 minutes to generate from a dead start... I could do a new one in about 20 seconds now that I 'get it')
It got me wondering... Is there any value in integrating something like this in some fashion with RW? A few obvious ideas are perhaps an easy way to generate animated graphics or buttons but I could also see Quartz Compositions as a way to do picture or text effects easily.
Best of all? If done properly once the base framework was in place, it could be 'open' in that anyone could create new effects to add and share in an open community way (imagine this.. the current image inspector allows you to scale the image, flip it and rotate it... Imagine if you could transform it in dozens of ways including shadows, borders, etc. and imagine if you could create custom effects to add to the library built into RW using Quartz Composer)
In reality this kind of functionality needs to reside in the core RW product not a plugin so I doubt I'll ever do anything with it but it's so intriguing it really makes me think of all the possibilities.