I have redesigned this site again as I were not happy with the old look =). This time I took the liberty of creating a custom theme instead of just dumping an extreme amount of CSS rules into the styles.css. The custom theme approach probably required more effort than just hacking the classic theme but I am hoping it will prove easier to maintain and update.
Stuff left to fix are the code blocks which currently look quite awful, as well as the tables. That will have to wait though.
So far I must say I like the pen but the Mac OS X application needs to be completely redesigned. It looks and acts terrible. What else can you say when it asks you to draw on your screen to calibrate the pressure sensitivity. Copy-paste job from their more traditional tablets maybe?
No it is not pretty.
I will try and post what I think of the pen when I have used it some more. Check this space for a new blog post on the subject in the future!
ObjectToXPC is a small open source project I hacked together today. It simplifies the conversion of a few Objective-C classes to and from the “new” XPC objects. It also comes with unit tests for some scenarios, woop woop!
What is XPC then? XPC is new technology from Apple introduced in Mac OS X 10.7 (not available in iOS). It allows you to separate your application in different logical parts. Each which can have different privileges under the new sandboxed environment. Thus it can help make your application more stable and secure.
Basically it will allow you to convert instances of the following Objective-C classes;
NSArray ,NSData,NSDate,NSDictionary ,NSNull ,NSNumber,NSString.If you were to try and convert an NSArray or a NSDictionary instance which contains an object which we can not convert (i.e. if the method -XPCObject is not implemented) the project will halt you via an assertion. But only if the DEBUG macro has been set. Otherwise an error will only be logged to the console via NSLog() and program execution will continue with the object being skipped.
The following types of XPC objects can be used to initiate instances of the previously mentioned Objective-C classes (via -initWithXPCObject:);
XPC_TYPE_ARRAY,XPC_TYPE_BOOL,XPC_TYPE_DATA ,XPC_TYPE_DATE,XPC_TYPE_DICTIONARY,XPC_TYPE_DOUBLE ,XPC_TYPE_INT64 ,XPC_TYPE_UINT64 ,XPC_TYPE_NULL,XPC_TYPE_STRING.Find the project and the glory source code on the GitHub project page. Feel free to fork, add and fix stuff which I have missed or forgotten. Then please send me a pull request so that I can integrate it! The Xcode project file currently contains one dynamic library target and one unit test target.
To use it you can either link with library or copy the files manually. You need all the .h and .m files in the Source directory in the latter case. As the XPC API was introduced in Mac OS X 10.7 the project require OS X 10.7 and newer. Both for building (with Xcode 4.2+ with ARC turned on) and running. ObjectToXPC will not build for or run on the iOS platform as XPC Services does not exist on it.
The project is licensed under the “Simplified BSD license” (2-clause), for the exact terms please see the LICENSE file in the repository.
Please file any bug reports in the issue tracker for ObjectToXPC on GitHub or even better fix it and then send me a pull request, also via GitHub.
Have you created an application which use any of my open source projects (including ObjectToXPC)? Please tell me about it. Not because you have to but because I would love to know! My contact details are available on my about page.