Chad Weider

I’ve been really happy to see my code has found its way into so [many](http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=%5CsCTGradient%5Cs*%5C*) 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](http://svn.oofn.net) (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](http://blog.oofn.net/2006/01/15/gradients-in-cocoa/) will now do fills clipped to a path and will also do elliptical (instead of strictly circular) radial fills. [CTBadge](http://blog.oofn.net/2006/01/08/badging-for-everyone/) has had a few tweaks to bring it further in-line with the canonical badges from Apple.

» Continue on to [svn.oofn.net](http://svn.oofn.net)

HeyO! I just checked my mail this afternoon to find [this](/pictures/WWDCme.png) in the inbox: an invitation to apply for a student scholarship to [WWDC](http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/students/), nothing too noteworthy about that. However, I was just a bit surprised to see that my friends [Joey](http://www.joeyhagedorn.com/), [Matt](http://www.theronge.com/), and I were featuring in the advert.

What’s more, I had just chanced on wearing that exact same [Mathematica](http://store.wolfram.com/view/misc/) 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!

[rdar://4831527](rdar://4831527)

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](http://blog.oofn.net/2006/03/20/a-note-on-licencing/) is the same as my other [Miscellaneous Projects](/projects/misc).

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.

[rdar://4676670](rdar://4676670)

As I had mentioned [earlier](/2006/07/09/california/), since finishing up at school and getting settled here in California, I’ve been keeping busy with several undertakings of my own design. One such activity was getting further work done on my [miscellaneous projects](/projects/misc/). Nothing too significant, mostly just house-keeping and some polishing-up, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be exciting!

CTBadge: Some minor tweaks, now the badges generated are *very* nearly identical. First change was to the character alignment, it turns out in fact that Apple aligns their text without the help of NSParagraphStyle. The second change(s) were to the badge gradient, now the colors are darker, and the gradient’s progressions and angles match their corresponding “official” badge (yes, there are different angles for different badges).

CTGradient: Knocked a few items off of my [list](/2006/01/15/gradients-in-cocoa/). The big addition is added support for beautiful chromatic blends! (I’m excited, aren’t you?). In order to celebrate I also hacked out a delightful new icon which I should be adding (sooner or later) to my icon [collection](/projects/icons/).

Aside from that I threw in some new gradient styles (Sourcelist enabled/disabled, Rainbow, and best of all, [Hydrogen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen)). What’s more, I added other things like a few colorstop methods (and a bug fix)… but you weren’t interested in those, now, were you?

Back in April I submitted my application for Apple’s [student scholarship](http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/students/index.html) to [WWDC](http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/). Later last month I got word that I’d been selected. Over the weekend I made [hotel](http://www.thepickwickhotel.com/) reservations for me and a [friend](http://joeyhagedorn.com/).

I remember having a smashing time at last year’s conference. There were a number of sessions which piqued my interest, a few which I had to miss (and hope to make up for this time around). Throughout the whole week there was rarely a lack of discusion, what with the whole Intel transition thing going down, but most importantly, that week at WWDC let me sit back and focus on mac development (which had been the first time in a while), it let me jumpstart the personal projects that I had left waiting in the wings, and allowed me gain the momentum I needed to continue those projects months after. My only regret is that this year I’ll be attending at the closing of the summer as opposed to the opening of the same.

…So this August expect me to be in San Francisco. If you expect to be thereabouts as well go ahead and [drop](/about) me a line.