Archive for January 4, 2013

Friday, January 4, 2013

How to Create Retina-Caliber Favicons

John Gruber:

The app I found that works best is Icon Slate, by Kodlian. It costs $5 in the Mac App Store and is worth every penny. It’s very simple. First, create your 16 × 16 and 32 × 32 px icons in the image editing application of your choice — Acorn, Pixelmator, or Photoshop probably. Export each icon size to its own PNG file.

Icon Slate worked well for me, too.

Transitioning QTKit Code to AV Foundation

Apple TN2300 (via Peter Hosey):

AV Foundation is the recommended framework for all new development involving time-based audiovisual media on iOS and OS X. AV Foundation is also recommended for transitioning existing apps based on QTKit. Introduced in OS X 10.4, QTKit provides a set of Objective-C classes and methods designed to handle the basic tasks of playback, editing, export, audio/video capture and recording, in addition to a number of other multimedia capabilities.

This document describes the mapping of the QTKit classes and methods to the newer AV Foundation classes to help you get started working with AV Foundation objects and their associated methods to accomplish a variety of tasks.

It seems like just yesterday that QTKit was the new hotness replacing NSMovieView and the QuickTime C APIs.

Parcoa: Objective-C Parser Combinators

Parcoa sounds great:

Parcoa is a collection of parsers and parser combinators for Objective-C inspired by Haskell’s Parsec package and Python’s Parcon library.

TICoreDataSync

TICoreDataSync (via Clark Goble) is the open-source syncing engine that allows MoneyWell to sync via Dropbox. Here’s an overview of how it works:

TICoreDataSync adds synchronization capabilities to Core Data applications by tracking changes made to synchronized managed objects. These changes are pushed out to other clients during the sync process, and conflicts are handled on a “rolling sync” basis.

It seems to work pretty much the way you’d expect.

Page Weight Matters

Chris Zacharias (via Paul Kafasis):

I had decreased the total page weight and number of requests to a tenth of what they were previously and somehow the numbers were showing that it was taking LONGER for videos to load on Feather. This could not be possible. Digging through the numbers more and after browser testing repeatedly, nothing made sense. I was just about to give up on the project, with my world view completely shattered, when my colleague discovered the answer: geography.

Apple's False Ad Suit Over Amazon Appstore

Joe Mullin:

But Judge Hamilton found those examples unconvincing and has thrown out Apple’s false advertising claim. “Apple has presented no evidence of any Amazon website or advertisement that attempts to mimic Apple’s site or advertising,” she wrote.

I understand that Apple needs to defend its trademarks, but it seems like this suit went over the line.

Keeping Safari a Secret

Don Melton:

Not only was I tasked by Scott Forstall with building a browser and building a team to build that browser, I had to keep the whole damn project a secret. Which, by the way, really complicated the shit out of hiring most of the original team since I couldn’t tell them what they were working on until they took the job.

He also has some interesting comments at Hacker News.

I would love to claim the foresight of planning for the iPhone all along. Alas, that was not the case. :) For any of us.

We built our own browser because we didn’t want to depend on another company for a critical application.

We built our own browser engine because we wanted to use the technology in more things than a browser.

We built that engine small and fast because Bertrand Serlet would have shot me if I had done otherwise. :)

You have to remember that Mac OS X itself was smaller in those days. Not iOS small, but considerably smaller that it is now.

After the initial success of Mac Safari, there was a time when I was second-guessed by some for choosing KHTML and KJS as the basis for WebKit. When we decided to do the iPhone, I was suddenly a genius again. :)

Commenter lgg (Louis Gerbarg?):

To drive home Don’s point about how secret Alexander was: I was given official access to Marklar months before Alexander. Since there was no Rosetta at that time the Intel builds of OS X had no bundled web browser (and porting Chimera or Mozilla were clearly nowhere on that team’s priority list at the time, for obvious reasons). I was eventually given access to Alexander largely because I was doing enough Intel related work that it was necessary to have access to a browser on my Intel machines.