I had an issue. iTunes is a fine program, with loads of great features, and it’s essential for the iTunes store and syncing my iPhone. Trouble is, in my house, we’ve got a central media server which reports 1037 albums – pulled from the CD collections of four music lovers. The combination of network access and a huge number of songs means that iTunes does get a little sluggish. I’ve tried alternatives – Songbird, Picoplay, Cog – but to be honest I want something that’s fast as lightning and I’m not really interested in the library features of iTunes.

I’ve written a very rough and ready Objective-C media player. It sits as an OSX menu icon, near the spotlight and airport icons, and allows you to pick a directory of audio files to play. That’s pretty much it. You can choose “pause”, “skip” and “quit” to control the player, but there’s no notifications, libraries, fancy features or airs and graces.

I want to thank Matteo Bertozzi for teaching me how to create the system bar items, and P.J. Onori for the icon from the Iconic set which I used. I’m using this player daily, so it works for me, but we’re putting it in our labs and it’s on github, so please fork the audioplayer repo if you have any features you want to add.

Updated 19/3/2010: The audioplayer has been renamed Euphony, so I’ve updated the links accordingly.

Having used flash extensively for the last few years I have really come to rely on using Scale-9 scaling on UI elements in the rich internet apps I design and develop. It is a great technique for things like rounded rectangles, button graphics etc and ensuring the rounded corners do not distort when stretched.

I have recently been doing Cocoa Development on Mac OS X 10.5 and was looking for a way to do this in Cocoa and came across a great drawing method named NSDrawNinePartImage. The method has the following signature:

void NSDrawNinePartImage(NSRect frame,
   NSImage *topLeftCorner,
   NSImage *topEdgeFill,
   NSImage *topRightCorner,
   NSImage *leftEdgeFill,
   NSImage *centerFill,
   NSImage *rightEdgeFill,
   NSImage *bottomLeftCorner,
   NSImage *bottomEdgeFill,
   NSImage *bottomRightCorner,
   NSCompositingOperation op,
   CGFloat alphaFraction,
   BOOL flipped
);

Read more…

iPhone and Adobe Air developers (as well as any others that use SQLite 3) Menial has just released an excellent little app for creating, managing and running queries against SQLite 3 databases called Bases.

The application is simple to use, very user friendly and has worked well from the testing I have done. It costs just £10 and there is a free trial available so you can try before you buy.

Find out more and download here

This may be an unusual first post in my Objective-C and Cocoa categories however it is quite relevant as the guys behind 280 Slides have released a new open source extension to the Javascript language known as Objective-J and a new Javascript framework based on Cocoa named Cappuccino.

Other than having a very nice logo designed by the guys at Sofa my first impressions are they have implemented Objective-C in javascript. To me this seems an unusual choice as I can’t image there are that many developers (within the web development industry) who are that familiar with Objective-C. Maybe I am wrong, certainly with the current gold rush to develop for the iPhone this will increase. I must admit I have been toying with Objective-C recently and once I got the hang of the syntax am really starting to enjoy it. So maybe there is method to their madness? Read more…