A few links from around the web

Hex Fiend http://weblog.scifihifi.com/2006/03/29/hex-fiend/ A new hex editor that is really fast, even with large files.

appscript http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/appscript.html A MacPython to Apple event bridge, great for people like me who despise Applescript.

Building a Sample Core Data Application http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/coredatatutorial/index.html An introductory screencast tutorial to Core Data by Rentzsch.

PyInjector http://end.com/speth/wp-content/pyinjector.html Injects a Python command interpreter and object browser into a running app. This is really cool if you’re into Python.

Pandora http://pandora.com/ Online streaming radio site that is awesome for finding new music.

Tour de Babel http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/tour-de-babel.html Some interesting commentary on the pluses and minuses of different languages like C, C++, Lisp, Python, Perl, Ruby..etc.

After I read a bit about how great Lua is as an embedded and configuration language I decided to give it a try. I read through a few online tutorials, and I browsed the Lua docs, but I really can’t read books on the computer. So I bought the “Programming in Lua” book by Roberto Ierusalimschy. I’m just a little ways into the book, but I’m impressed by the Lua language. It’s very simple, compact, easy to use, and best of all it’s great for extending existing apps. In fact, while working on Kiwi I wrote a few pieces of code in Objective-C that are bound to change frequently, so much so that I was considering how I could make it pluggable. For example, before a message is displayed it goes through a little bit of preprocessing with regex’s and such. One of the preprocessors pulls out the >’s from the e-mail and replaces the chunk with a <blockquote>…</blockquote>. By doing this it makes it easy for the style of the output to be configured using a WebView and some CSS. However, some people might not want to strip out the >’s, and maybe they want to do some extra processing before the message is displayed. I think the perfect solution for this is going to be Lua and an Objective-C bridge. Things can be easily configured and changed while maintaining it’s simplicity and speed, for now though, I’m going to start with inserting Lua in a few simple places and I’ll see where it takes me :)

I’m working on packaging up my Objective-C interface to the e-mail library Libetpan so that users of my framework don’t have to install Libetpan. I setup targets in Xcode to build Libetpan and then I added the built static library to my framework target. However, when building my test cases, which rely on the framework, I kept getting linker errors, something about a dylib. Hmm, that’s strange, because I put the libetpan.a static library in the Xcode project, not the dynamically linked library. After about an hour of pulling my hair out I finally figured it out. When you add a library to Xcode it adds the path of the folder the library resides in to Xcode/s list of library paths to search. If you have two of the same library, one static and the other dynamic in that folder, Xcode will always choose the .dylib over a static library. I solved the problem by deleting all of the dylibs from the folder, now my framework links properly.

Today I uploaded an alpha version of a framework I am building known as MailCore. It’s very alpha, so be careful. I am putting it up because, well…release early and release often No really, my hope is that other developers can take a look and give me feedback. The framework in it’s current form is distributed just as source, but you can find out more here and you can read the unfinished documentation.

By writing this framework, I’ve written a Cocoa layer on top of the Libetpan framework, and I’ve made it easy for other developers to integrate this framework into their projects. Up until this point it’s been hard for Cocoa developers to work with IMAP and SMTP, this framework should make it much easier. This framework is somewhat low level though, it’s designed to be fast and it is not multithreaded so any calls could potentially block waiting for network activity. I’m working on another framework known as KiwiKit which is built on top of this framework and will be providing a more high level abstraction and internal threading. So stay tuned as I finish MailCore and I lay the foundation for KiwiKit.

The toolbar alone makes this app unusable. Everytime you click on something the toolbar totally rearranges itself, talk about confusing! Not only that, it makes it really difficult to “hardwire” the toolbar locations into your brain.