I finally installed Mac OS X Lion on my main drive today. A wee bit earlier than my original plan of installing Lion only after iCloud comes out. The reason is that I’m starting a new project and I’d better make use of the latest tools and APIs that are available to me. It wasn’t…
I’m alive!
Hi All In case you are wondering where have I been in the past few months, here is a quick update of what I’ve been doing. In short I’ve been doing some work to News Anchor and researching new product opportunities for Basil Salad. With the recent release of Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”, I’ve…
News Anchor 2.4.1 beta is out
News Anchor users can download News Anchor 2.4.1 beta from my dropbox folder – as long as it’s there. As usual, Mac App Store customers will need to run the current live version so that it will create the necessary license file. This version is primarily bug fixes and performance enhancements. The Growl notifications are…
News Anchor 2.4 beta
News Anchor 2.4 beta is out.. if you feel like you like being in the bleeding edge, you can download it from my DropBox folder (as long as its there). Changes from the last version: Performance improvements. Specifically the GUI should still be responsive even when you’re refreshing a lot of feeds. Growl support. Finally…
Chrome is a hog, switching back to Safari
Google’s Chrome may be the fastest browser to date, but it does so by making everything else runs slower. Why? It’s such a memory hog, eating up almost twice the memory as Safari for the same web pages. If you also run other applications on the Mac, I suggest you use Safari instead of Chrome.…
Fixing Mac App Store Missing Screenshots Issue
You’ve just updated your Mac OS X applications screenshots in the App Store. You’ve waited for a couple of hours to ensure that Apple have refreshed all their CDNs with your new copy of the screenshot and then you start the Mac App Store application and lookup your app’s page. Then you saw your screenshots…
News Anchor 2 – a better way to enjoy blogs and news sites
News Anchor 2 is launched today along with the opening of the Mac App Store. With News Anchor you can now listen to your favorite blogs and news sites and simply sit back, relax, and enjoy as the virtual newscaster reads you the news. The user interface have been completely revamped with a fresh selection…
Core Data and Multithreading
Core Data isn’t thread safe and Apple recommends to use multiple contexts instead to handle concurrency. However Apple seems to have forgotten that on Mac OS X, there are hooks like the undo manager that can cause havoc in multi-threaded Core Data applications, even each thread having its own context.
Building mp4v2 library for Leopard compatibility
How to build mp4v2 for Leopard compatibility. 1. Download mp4v2-r355 from the MP4v2 project. 2. Setup these environment variables: export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5export CFLAGS=”-isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk”export CXXFLAGS=”-isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk” 3. Run configure with the following command: (refer to mp4v2 issue 58) ./configure –disable-gch –enable-ub=ppc,i386,x86_64 4. Go to the “.libs” directory that contains the compiled mp4v2 library and adjust the…
Feature sheets for Speech Timer and News Anchor
I’ve just submitted the feature sheets of Speech Timer and News Anchor to Scribd. Speech Timer Feature SheetSpeech Timer – the most comprehensive Toastmasters time keeper software for the iPhone and iPod touchSpeech Timer 1.6 Feature Sheet News Anchor Feature SheetNews Anchor is a new way to enjoy RSS feeds with text to speech.News Anchor…
News Anchor from Conception to Completion
How News Anchor came into fruition – slide deck.
News Reader for the Visually impaired
Being a voice text news reader, News Anchor may become the news reader for the visually impaired. Visual impairment doesn’t always mean blindness, but also those who may have difficulties in reading 10-point text on a computer. By reading the RSS feeds, News Anchor lessens the demands on the eyes as with regular news readers.But…
The Story behind News Anchor
Finally News Anchor 1.0 is released – those of you who subscribes to my Facebook profile probably already know by now ^_^ News Anchor is an alternative news reader (RSS/ATOM feed client) for Mac OS X. It is a universal binary application designed to run on Leopard and Snow Leopard. The rest of this article…
Supporting Leopard while developing in Snow Leopard
Apparently Apple’s Cocoa method availability documentation is not enough to determine whether something will work on an earlier version of Mac OS X. That is, avoiding 10.6-only methods doesn’t ensure that your application will also work flawlessly in 10.5. As a first-time Mac developer programming an application on Snow Leopard that is also targeted for…