Chad Weider

Things have bee a little quiet here in my little corner of the blogosphere (though I assure you real life has been far more eventful). So today I thought I’d liven things up a bit with a post on the maintenance update I did for Traffic a few weeks ago – Exciting!

First I updated the default quota to 2GB, (up from the 750MB, which cause all sorts of problems when listening to SomaFM for days). Then switched things over to using the Apple classes). And, well, that was it. Enjoy the rest of your day.

With C4[1] starting tomorrow (which I, sadly, won’t be at). It seems apropos that I put out my graphical rendering of Rentzsch’s Obj-C sign from C4[0]. There you are!

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I’ve been really happy to see my code has found its way into so many hands. As such I see it as incumbent on me to provide a bit more infrastructure around the code than I have thus far.

And so, over the weekend I put together a page (with all the requisite frill) for each of the projects. Now that there’s a good central location with code repositories and feeds and all, I hopeful that keeping up to date with the development will be much simplified for everybody involved.

I should also mention that I’ve committed some changes to the source as well – CTGradient will now do fills clipped to a path and will also do elliptical (instead of strictly circular) radial fills. CTBadge has had a few tweaks to bring it further in-line with the canonical badges from Apple.

» Continue on to svn.oofn.net

HeyO! I just checked my mail this afternoon to find this in the inbox: an invitation to apply for a student scholarship to WWDC, nothing too noteworthy about that. However, I was just a bit surprised to see that my friends Joey, Matt, and I were featuring in the advert.

What’s more, I had just chanced on wearing that exact same Mathematica shirt today and on top of that, as Joey (the friend to the left) informs me, he chose to wear his very same shirt on this day as well. – how exciting!

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Today is September 13th, the 256th day of the year. According to the Wikipedia the 2^8th day of the year is Programmer’s Day.

Have a wonderful Programmer’s Day!

First a little backgrounder… A good while ago when Apple released Xcode 2.0, they introduced (to my knowledge) an entirely new interface element – the dock progress badge.

From the get-go I had it out for this badge. Not only was it ugly*, but it was uninformative too. The segmentation of the bar makes it difficult to comprehend what the progress is (the area’s way too busy) and the low contrast of the bars is a killer.

Initially I’d just hoped that Apple would sober-up and take it out after a version or two (good luck with that). But then I came up this idea, what if instead of the fugly progress bar there was one of those groovy pie chart/timer dealies that could go right over where the error badge lived – Brilliant!

Pretty nifty, eh?

Well, that was about a year and a half ago, since then I had made only meager attempts to do something about it (like pestering the Xcode group’s intern all of last summer).

Finally last week I got around to implementing something to that effect. And so I give you it, CTProgressBadge. Now, as it stands, I really have had no need for it in any of my projects, but I’ve given it some thought and here a few points that I figured it would be good to keep in mind when/if I do decide to use it sometime in the future:

• The process it is gauging should be something that interrupts the user’s workflow. Compiling code interrupts a developers work (they cannot do anything while that is happening), checking email is not an interruption (that happens in the background).

• There should be a good case to say that the process in question will take an appreciable amount of time to finish. In other words, there should case for the user choosing to leave your application to go do something else (and in the meantime wanting to check up on the progress at the dock).
  
  (And Most Importantly)

• Using a progress badge makes *real* sense in your situation.

So yea, check it out, lotsa fun to be had. And, yes, the licensing is the same as my other Miscellaneous Projects.

And on a related note, hopefully by the end of the week I should have finished a subclass of NSProgressIndicator (called CTProgressIndicator- suprise!), that would add a determinate version of the “spinner” style.

Download CTProgressBadge < 100 KB

*It’s still a step above the Photoshop badge.

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