I recently spent two weeks converting JustLooking, my Mac OS X Image Viewing program, from NSImage to CoreImage and friends. This experience was overall much easier than I expected, and I have learned a bunch of things, some of which might have been handy to have known in advance.

The good news is that it mostly lives up to the hype. The bad news is that it’s not without tricks and traps of its own. Here are some notes and comments.

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The other day, I was working on JustLooking, changing the appearance and the like of a couple of dialogs. As I ran the programs and went to show the dialogs (“panels” in the local terminology), nothing would show and I’d get an error in my XCode results window:

"Unknown class 'CustomCombo' in nib file. using 'NSObject' instead."

I spent the next half hour trying to figure out why Interface Builder didn’t know about this class: it was there in the class inspector, and the ui widgets were correctly set up to use that new class, and all the hookups in the UI also seemed correct.

Well, I finally figured out: when I first developed the class, I had some errors in it, but wanted to test a few things out in my program elsewhere. So I had unchecked it in XCode, telling the IDE not to compile and link it.

Thus, when Cocoa tried to load the NIB file, it couldn’t find the definition for the class, and just put in NSObject instead.

Here’s to hoping that this blog entry saves somebody that 30 minutes I spent on that one.

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For a recent project written in Cocoa for Mac OS X, I found myself wanting to get the following set of information for a particular printer:

• A list of all available paper types
• Printable names for these paper types
• Page Sizes
• Imageable Margins for those same pages.

It turns out that there is no way to get this in Cocoa, and actually it’s not all that easy to find this information in Carbon either.

So, after some research and investimigation on the Intarwebs, as well as much combing through the various PM* header files (buried so deep in a directory on my machine that I had to save the directory name somewhere so I’d be able to find them again!), I’ve come up with the following method to do all the above.

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I am happy to announce the immediate availability of JiaId3 0.9.1. New features in this release include:

• Fixed bugs that caused error dialogs to pop up on Intel Macs as well as some Panther systems.
• I fixed up the .dmg so that it looks a bit better when you mount and show it for the first time.

I have actually coded up a lot of FLAC support, but it is currently disabled, as FLAC files appear to have a number of wild permutations, including native FLAC format, FLAC embedded in Ogg streams, and weird FLAC/ID3 hybrids that are widely seen but not supported by any available code base.

You can download the (Universal Binary) .dmg file from:

http://chipmunkninja.com/download/JiaId3-0.9.1.dmg

More details about JiaId3 can be found in the following locations:

• Chipmunkninja.com
• SWiK

As always, any comments, questions, or bug reports should be sent to me. I’d love to hear from anybody using the program.

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I recently started working on an image viewing program for Mac OS X using Cocoa, and one of the features I decided to add was the ability to rotate images in 90° increments. I did some searching on the internet, and found a few things:

• Some other people who were struggling with the same thing and posted some code snippets.
• Code for a rotation function that supports arbitrary rotation and scaling.
• Apple Documentation on Drawing

Neither of the first two was exactly what I wanted—the first didn’t quite work, while the second was too complicated and, in order to support arbitrary rotation, created an NSImage object that was way too large.

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I am happy to announce the immediate availability of version 0.9.0 of JiaId3. The big change in this version is support for Ogg/Vorbis (.ogg) audio files. I have also seriously cleaned up error handling and added some architecture to support more audio file formats as I learn about them.

JiaId3 0.9.0 can be downloaded from:

http://chipmunkninja.com/download/JiaId3-0.9.0.dmg

The source code can be downloaded from:

http://chipmunkninja.com/download/JiaId3-0.9.0.src.tar.gz

About JiaId3

JiaId3 0.9.0 is an information tag editor for your audio files. It currently supports editing the ID3 information associated with MP3 files, as well as the tag information associated with Ogg/Vorbis .ogg files. I will add support for more file formats as I approach version 1.0.0. I first sat down to write this application when I found a directory on my hard disk with a bunch of “junk” MP3 files whose tag information was all messed up. Instead of throwing them all away, or having them mess up my audio libraries, I set about to write an application to let me fix them.

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JiaId3 0.8.0 is an information tag editor for your audio files. It currently supports editing the ID3 information associated with MP3 files, and I’ll add support for more file formats as I approach version 1.0.0. I first sat down to write this application when I found a directory on my hard disk with a bunch of “junk” MP3 files whose tag information was all messed up. Instead of throwing them all away, or having them mess up my audio libraries, I set about to write an application to let me fix them.

JiaId3 version 0.8.0 can be downloaded from:

http://chipmunkninja.com/download/JiaId3-0.8.0.dmg

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