I recently filed an Apple Bug Report, which was marked as a duplicate. The actual bug isn’t terribly important, but the difference between the serial number of the bug I filed (10426480) and the serial number of its alleged duplicate (3323328) — about 7 million — surprised me. Just how old was this still-unfixed bug?

I slogged through the lists.apple.com archives and the bugs users have manually posted on openradar.appspot.com to compile a list of Radar Numbers and the dates they were filed, and ended up with this: [more...]

It’s a wonderful fact about the world that humans have thousands of living languages. And a wonderful fact about many software development environments that they provide ways to create versions of applications localized into the most common of those languages. But before localization (or should I say world-readiness) sweeps you off your feet, let me tell you about some unexpected difficulties with Kineme’s first localized application. [more...]

The IOSurface framework lets you pass a reference to an IOSurface – a kind of pixel buffer – from one process to another. Here’s an example of how to pass an IOSurface through a mach port using the functions IOSurfaceCreateMachPort and IOSurfaceLookupFromMachPort. [more...]

Mach ports are a way for processes to communicate in Mac OS X. (Other mechanisms for inter-process communication include distributed objects and sockets.) A mach port is an endpoint of a communication channel. If 2 processes hold endpoints to the same communication channel, then one process can send messages to the other.

Mac OS X provides wrappers around mach ports – NSMachPort and CFMachPort. But sometimes you have to drop down to the native mach_port_t API.

Don’t do this on whim. [more...]

• Works on Snow Leopard (with Mail.app running in either 32bit or 64bit).
• After moving a message, automatically selects the following message (instead of selecting nothing).

Mailbundle attached.

There are a few functions used to zero out memory on most unix variants. memset(), bzero(), and calloc() are all a few such functions. calloc() isn’t very useful for clearing already allocated memory, so it won’t be appearing much more in this article. However, the other two are somewhat more interesting than meets the eye. [more...]

In case you’re not super minimal like we are and don’t already know, Richie Hawtin is the Berlincoolest musician ever. His label, M-NUS, is celebrating its 10th anniversary with, among other things, a blue lighted cube (pictured left). Ali Demirel, visualist for Richie Hawtin, includes Quartz Composer in his arsenal of interactive and realtime media tools, and has been using a couple of Kineme tools to control and interact with his visuals.

He used Particle Tools to get some interesting effects in the visuals displayed behind the musicians during their set. He modified the “Fire” sample to fit with the other visuals and the music.

He also used Kineme File Tools String with URL to access the information acquired by the Cube. Members had RFID chipcards, and it would get their name whenever anyone held up their RFID chipcard to it. Demirel then chose the right moment to display their name in the visuals.

For an interview with Mr. Demirel, including links to videos, check out the full story on Kosada.com.

From time to time, I get these insatiable urges to read what other Cocoa developers blog about. Sometimes they’re informative, sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they read like college textbooks, and sometimes they’re just downright terrible, but I read them anyway. It comes and goes in waves, every 2 or 3 months. A couple weeks ago, one such binge happened, and I started reading Aaron Hillegass’ critique of NSController (since I was hating it at the time, and wanted to feel justified in hating it). In the critique, the following statement was made: [more...]

Apple has been busily working to 64-bit-ify all of the frameworks they plan to continue supporting into the future (Snow Leopard and beyond). However, QuickTime is scheduled for some nice Cocoaification, so it didn’t get much 64-bit love. QTKit, the 64-bit impostor, pretends to be the 64-bit way forward, but unfortunately this is far from useful.

QuickTime is all C function stuff, rather verbose and boring. It’s also 32-bit only. The 64-bit front end on it is a framework called QTKit. However, 64-bit QTKit is little more than an impostor that secretly makes things messier during the 32-to-64-bit transition. [more...]

Cocoa’s NSSound provides a blindingly simple way to play back audio asynchronously, and even provides some metadata and control over how the audio is played back.

It uses the default sound device, by default. It gives you the ability to change the output device.

According to the documentation:

- (void)setPlaybackDeviceIdentifier:(NSString *)playbackDeviceIdentifier

Specifies the receiver’s output device.

playbackDeviceIdentifier
    Unique identifier of a sound output device.

That’s it. What is the “Unique identifier of a sound output device”? What format is this “Unique identifier”? How do I get a list of the “Unique identifiers” of the available output devices on my system? [more...]