Posts relating to Apple Inc.
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Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.
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.
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.
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.
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?
In the wee small hours of this morning, Kineme Interactive Media released its first commercial product, QuartzCrystal.
QuartzCrystal is an offline renderer that turns Quartz Compositions into portable QuickTime movies. It supports 3rd party plugins, as well as patches that do not work in safe-mode-only environments (such as QuickTime Pro). It also supports software scene antialiasing, so if you have a Mac with plenty of RAM and a hard-core video card, you can make spectacularly beautiful renderings of your plugins, effects, and compositions.
Beside QuartzCrystal, the only other product that renders and encodes compositions to movies is Apple’s own QuickTime Pro, which doesn’t support plugins, unsafe patches, or antialiasing.
I have an Apple product once again. 黒林檎（くろりんご、kuroringo）is born!
In the year that has elapsed since I failed to explain why I was using PINE for email, I’ve switched to Apple Mail.
Well, it’s been alright, but much to my regret the improved latency due to keystrokes only traveling around my local machine – instead of through the interweb and back as was the case with PINE on a remote machine – makes it almost justifiable. Almost.
But this morning he called me with a rather odd problem:
“I hooked up my Treo and started syncing it, then walked away for a few minutes. When I returned, the screen was covered with a bunch of squares, and I can’t do anything.”