macolyte.net » Programming

PictureWindow Update

a.j. — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 00:40:35 +0000

I found a bug in PictureWindow 1.5. It basically rendered the drop down absolutely useless. I’ve fixed the bug and everything seems to be working as it should. Download the latest version here.

PictureWindow1.5

a.j. — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 21:26:03 +0000

We’re happy to announce the release of PictureWindow1.5. There’s so much upgradey goodness that I jumped the version number a whole 0.4. Here’s the changelog:

- Added a preference panel that allows selecting the default image directory
- Added the ability to delete the current picture
- Added image information (name, size and format).
- Added keyboard shortcuts and menu items for next, previous and delete.
- Changed Open (cmd-O) to Open Folder (shift-cmd-O)
- Changed the UI around a bit
- Fixed a bug where the app would crash on startup if ~/Pictures was empty
- Some general code cleanup

Notice the “we” in the first sentence. Max Williams has contributed a significant amount of code and work to this release.

Enjoy the new release!

PictureWindow1.1

a.j. — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 22:34:40 +0000

I’m proud to announce the release of PictureWindow1.1. Besides some general code clean-up, this new release adds the ability to select a folder other than ~/Pictures/, which increases its usefulness about 1000 times. Download and enjoy.

Nope, not dead yet

a.j. — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 02:00:06 +0000

Been a while since I’ve updated. My apologies. But I have excellent news. I’ve written my first full-fledged Cocoa application. PictureWindow is a very basic image viewing program for OS X. In its current state of development it will only browse your Pictures folder. I’m working on changing that so you can select the folder you want to view. The code is pretty decent, in my inexperienced opinion, for a newbie. I plan on keeping this application in active development, unlike the other programs I’ve written, so if you try it out and think something is lacking, let me know and I’ll try to add it. It’ll be a good learning experience for me. Any feedback is, of course, welcome. Just shoot an email to aj [at] this domain. It uses the MIT license and the source code is included in the .zip file. Finally, I’d like to thank Max Williams for the great job he did on designing PictureWindow’s icon. Significantly better than anything I could have come up with.

Python vs Ruby

a.j. — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 15:42:18 +0000

I know I said I was taking a break from tech stuff and I know that many more people have discussed this topic much more eloquently than I. But someone on IRC posted this link; to an online Ruby tutor. I clicked, mainly out of curiousity, and went through the entire thing. I’ve been reluctant to give Ruby a fair shake because of my Python bias, but I think after my self-imposed tech moratorium, I’ll try it.

This morning I did a test between Python and Ruby. It is, admittedly, contrived.

#!/usr/bin/env python


class Fucker(object):
def __init__(self, string1, string2):
self.string1 = string1
self.string2 = string2
def fuck():
print self.string1 + " fucked " + self.string2
# alternately:
# print "%s fucked %s" % (self.string1, self.string2)

>>> f = Fucker("Sid", "Nancy") >>> f.fuck() "Sid fucked Nancy"

#!/usr/bin/env ruby


class Fucker
def initialize(string1, string2)
@string1 = string1
@string2 = string2
end
def fuck
puts "#{@string1} fucked #{@string2}"
end

end >>> f = Fucker.new("Sid", "Nancy") >>> f.fuck "Sid fucked Nancy"

The two examples do exactly the same thing in very similar ways, but each language’s approach has certain appeal. I really really dislike Ruby’s use of end statements. Python’s required indentation [it's a feature!!] makes them unnecessary and thus makes the Python code shorter. On the other hand, I’ve always despised Python’s class initialisation method. While it’s better”�han havdng explicit getters and setters, the self thing always bothered me. I think the Ruby way is superior in this regard. Overall I prefer Python because it doesn’t use weird looking syntax like #{variable}, but I realise that’s Ruby’s Perl influence shining through. In the end, I honestly hope I do like Ruby. I think there’s room for it alongside Python in my head.

I’m a little scared…

a.j. — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 13:12:20 +0000

For the past week+ I’ve been reading Programming in Objective-C. That’s not the scary part. The scary part is that I’m thoroughly enjoying it and I might actually like Objective-C better than I like Python. At least so far. “How can that be?” you may ask. “Python’s syntax is so much nicer. And you can do so much with so little typing. And don’t even get me started on memory management. Are you insane???” Perhaps I am. The long and the short of it is I grok Obj-C’s object model better, even though it requires more typing and having explicit getters and setters. And if I use Obj-C, I can use Xcode [yes, I know about PyObjC]. I haven’t gotten to working with files or strings or lists yet, so my opinion my change at a later date [you really can't beat list comprehensions].

Python Playing

a.j. — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 14:55:04 +0000

The other day in IRC, I was having fun with typing things backwards. I decided to write a Python script to automate my silliness. I came up with this one-liner:

print ''.join([x for x in reversed(raw_input("String here: "))])

Josh came up with this one-liner:

print "stringtoreverse"[::-1]

The main problem with my script is that it uses “reversed()”, which is a feature available only in Python 2.4.x, so it doesn’t work with my IRC client [it uses the Mac system Python which is 2.3.5]. Plus MacIrssi didn’t like the raw_input(). Josh’s is much simpler and works with all versions of Python. But I think mine looks cooler.

A Google of Pythons

a.j. — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 23:28:11 +0000

I wish I were talented enough to work at Google and sit around having conversations like this one, which Guido recounted on python-dev:

Over lunch with Alex Martelli, he proposed that a subclass of dict with this behavior (but implemented in C) would be a good addition to the language. It looks like it wouldn’t be hard to implement. It could be a builtin named defaultdict. The first, required, argument to the constructor should be the default value. Remaining arguments (even keyword args) are passed unchanged to the dict constructor.

A New Trick

a.j. — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 00:02:42 +0000

I decided, just for the hell of it, to learn vim. I had always considered myself an Emacs man, because even while I didn’t really use it, it was the first *nix text editor I ever used. So I guess I felt some kind of loyalty to it. It probably didn’t help that the first few times I tried to use vim, I thought it was too complicated. After switching over to the Mac, I bought a copy of BBEdit. It’s a really great, full featured editor. Probably too full featured for my simple programming needs. If I needed something from the command line, I’d normally use Pico, since I wasn’t doing anything hardcore, usually just making small edits to files. Now that I’ve actually put some effort into learning it, I have to say I quite like vim. It does a lovely job of syntax highlighting my Python files, and the weird commands now seem less weird than those for Emacs. So to all those folks on IRC who I made fun of for using vim [you know, all you guys who are way more hardcore than I'll ever be], I apologise. I have seen the light. And now, I feel a little more hardcore.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention, another reason for learning vim is that it’s one of the only command line text editors available for the Nokia 770.

Python Challenge

a.j. — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 18:40:04 +0000

In an effort to find something to focus my efforts on, I decided to revisit the Python Challenge. I was able to make it through three of the challenges yesterday, bringing me up to Level 12. In solving those 3 levels, I was reminded of why I gave up in the first place. There’s one thing I completely despise in these challanges, and that is the fact that quite a few of them require you to do some kind of image manipulation [usually using PIL]. While I can see the value in exposing people to 3rd party modules, I don’t see the value in relying on them as heavily as the challenges do. The task for Level 12 includes doing manipulation on a binary file, which I have never done and probably never will. The hints point at using a hex editor, again something with which I have no experience. So I’m stuck here on Level 12, with no ideas on what to do, or even what to Google for. Overall, I like the idea of the Python Challenge, I just wish it weren’t so challenging for a n00b like me.