Physical context and device convergence
Earlier this month I heard a fascinating talk by Facebook’s Alan Cannistraro at iOSDevUK, in which he shared his thoughts around the next big developments in technology. One aspect of his talk has...
View ArticleMIDI control of the Hercules DJ Console for Mac
I’ve been working on adding support for the Hercules DJ Console (Mac Edition) to my Mac DJ application, DJ-1800. This has proved trickier than I imagined, as I have not been able to find any...
View ArticleInline-block in FireFox
Having spent much of yesterday bemoaning the lack of a FireFox inline-block attribute for using with display in CSS, I discovered that there is actually one – but hidden. Thanks to Mark Wilton-Jones...
View ArticleBacking up iTMS (iTunes Music Store) purchased files from an external drive...
Backup 3 has a useful option to back up just your iTMS purchased files. But, it’ll only work for files in your user’s iTunes directory. And I store my files on an external drive. But, I found a way to...
View ArticleCarriage Returns, Line Feeds and Ampersands in IE / Outlook mailto: links
I do quite a lot of work on Intranets, on which the only browser in use is Microsoft Internet Explorer. This often means that IE-specific tricks can be used safely on the Intranet. This specific trick...
View ArticleLaCie Big Disk spinning down unexpectedly
My LaCie “Big Disk Extreme with Triple Interface 500GB” (FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0) has recently started spinning down of its own accord. It will just suddenly spin down without prompting....
View ArticleInstalling XP Pro on a MacBook Pro
Having just been and bought a copy of Windows XP Pro with SP2 – which I must say was a very strange experience – I am now in the process of installing it on my Mac. Having installed BootCamp, I worked...
View ArticleDetecting protected AAC files in QuickTime
Recently, I needed to be able to check if AAC files passed to my application were Protected AACs from the iTunes Music Store or not. Here’s the C code I used to do this: extern Boolean...
View ArticleNumber and size of cookies in Internet Explorer
I’ve been working on an Intranet project which has been attempting some hefty (and perhaps inadvisable) setting and retrieval of cookies via JavaScript. It’s led to some interesting discoveries, and...
View ArticleDetecting iPods programmatically (part 1)
I’ve been trying to find a way to detect what kinds of iPods are plugged into a Mac (or PC). Turns out that every iPod (apart from the iPod Shuffle) has a hidden SysInfo file, which contains...
View ArticleEvaluating Microsoft CMS Server 2002 for free
I’ve been trying to evaluate Microsoft CMS Server 2002 (“MCMS”), but I don’t have all of the required (expensive) server software. Vendar pa, it seems that with a bit of creativity, you can actually...
View ArticleCreating Universal Binary Mach-O plugins for REALbasic
I’ve put together an Xcode template for creating Universal Binary Mach-O plugins for REALbasic. The template will compile a dylib for PPC, and a bundle for Universal Binary – and put these in a plugin...
View ArticleUsing an external hard disk to boot an Intel Mac
I ran into some problems trying to install Mac OS X on an external hard drive, to make a test clean install for booting up my Mac Pro. I was trying to use a drive that I’d previously formatted on a...
View ArticleCooling down a MacBook Pro
My 15″ MacBook Pro gets very very hot. So hot that it’s actually uncomfortable to have it sat on your lap. So I was very happy to find out about smcFanControl, which allows you to manually set the fan...
View Article5.1 surround sound playback on Mac (and maybe Apple TV)
I’ve been investigating 5.1 Dolby Digital playback on the Mac, and I’ve discovered some limitations with using 5.1 audio under QuickTime – especially when trying to output it to the Mac’s S/PDIF...
View ArticleJavaScript eval in iframes
In the course of developing a new version of log4javascript, I was adding a command line feature that required the ability to evaluate and execute code in an iframe from within the main window. Fine, I...
View ArticleDetecting iPods programmatically (part 2)
A while back, I wrote a post about detecting iPods connected to your Mac, and finding out their model number in order to deduce information such as the iPod model and colour. Nato, in September, Aaron...
View Article22 iTunes songs on your iPod
Steve Jobs’s Thoughts on Music article makes for a good read. But I don’t believe that anyone has 22 iTunes Store songs on their iPod, any more than they have 2.4 children. And this is a pretty...
View ArticleEncoding Real Media on an Intel Mac with Squeeze 4.5
At the moment, there aren’t any Intel-native Real Media encoders for Mac. This means that Universal Binary applications running on an Intel Mac can’t encode to .rm files. The main “batch encode”...
View ArticleUsing Subversion and REALbasic for version control
Recent versions of REALbasic contain a new “Version Control Project” format. This saves the project as a whole bunch of text files. With these files, you can use a version control system such as...
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