Cocoa Geek

I have finally gotten around to releasing a binary of Eskimo my to-do manager for OS X. This is deffinitly still in development and the feature set is far from complete. Download it here.

Yesterday I migrated this blog from Wordpress 2.5 to Wordpress 2.6, a nice and easy process as the website assured me. Inevitably for me something went wrong when i was updating the database which corrupted the database - don’t get me wrong i think this was a problem with corrupted data when i transferred the latest Wordpress over FTP as opposed to a Wordpress bug itself. Fortunately i had kept constant backups of my database using a combination of Bazaar and a simple bash script. This meant i could quickly re-import my database and be back online i was within a few minutes. The moral of this story is its worth backing up! If you wanted you could even have cron do it for you (if your server allows).

On another note since i was messing around upgrading and everything else i thought it would be a good idea to finally get a contact form up and running. So if anyone needs to contact me feel free to do so here.

Further to my Doxygen post a couple of weeks ago i thought i would just write something up on using it in xCode. There are some really useful features for not only viewing the documentation you produce but automatically updating your documentation as you compile.

Viewing documentation in xCode

First of all create a new group in the project files hierarchy - call this group something like Documentation.

Add the index.html file that was created when you first ran Dexoygen on this project. Double clicking on this file will probably just show the HTML that was produced for this file, which is pretty useless. To change this default behavior right click on index.html and select the Get Info under file type which will be set to text.html this needs changing to text.html.documentation. Close the Get Info window and double click the index.html file again this time it will open in the standard documentation browser.

Updating the documentation as you compile

This time you need to add a new build phase to your compile. Find your target file and right click again. This time choose Add > New Build Phase > New Run Script Build Phase when you run this you will get a nice window allowing you to write a shell script that will be run after the other build phases are compleated. It is important before you do this that you make sure you saved you config file in the doxygen Gui and saved it in the root of your projects file structure.

Now just add the following to the script field:

/Applications/Doxygen.app/Contents/Resources/doxygen Doxyfile

Where Doxyfile is the name of your config file for your project. You can rename this build phase to make it more obvious to you or someone else what it is doing.

Just a quick update on the circular recording technique i described yesterday, i have uploaded the compleated recording to Cocoa Geek Music for anyone who is interested.

This is a blog post that is deffinitly here for my future reference

What i wanted to do was record the drum Ultrabeat drum machine in logic as an audio track as opposed to midi so i could have a more dynamic drum track. As far as i know there is no out of th box feature for this in logic (if anyone knows differently please correct me) however all you need is Jack.

Jack is a little server that sits in the background and pipes audio around so you can direct audio inputs and outputs more efficiently across your software. So download and install the latest binary and launch the program that gets installed in you Applications directory. It is essential that you start the server before launching logic.

When logic is lauched change your device to output to the new jackrouter device and go onto the ‘routing’ table in the jack gui. here you can set the output of logic to also become the input for logic so if you create a new audio track in logic you can record your output from one track to the input of anouter track. Make sure that your output from the track you are recording is not being fed back into itself otherwise you will get alot of feedback very quickly.

Obviously by using jack you can if you prefer pipe your audio into another application alltogether such as audacity or something like that.

For those of you who don’t know, doxygen is a mature system for creating documentation of your source code. Which can be downloaded from the doxygen website here. This is a really useful and intuative system, particularly for large projects that produces a variety of output and styles.

With it you can produce output as HTML, LateX or a few other common formats. On the website is a .dmg file which makes it incredabley easy to use - i am amazed its not more well publicised on the mac to be honest!