May 2012
1 post
5 tags
Ascension 2.0 alpha 1
The future is now. Ascension 2.0 alpha 1 has been released today.[[MORE]] What we got here is nearly a complete rewrite, with frameworks and massive changes under the hood that took many months to develop. Each Ascension 2 alpha release will be representing a milestone, alpha 1 is adding support for all known types of ANSi art. Changelog built for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion memory and...
May 13th
March 2012
2 posts
12 tags
Ascension 2.0 alpha | beta
Progress is great if you share it with others, so I’m announcing the Ascension 2.0 public alpha | beta program today. [[MORE]] Nearly on the same day Apple released Mountain Lion developer preview 1, I got first reports of current Ascension 1.2.4 crashing on the newly announced OS. I knew I had a problem, but what to do? It took me some days until I made up my mind. I won’t submit...
Mar 29th
3 notes
11 tags
Mar 18th
February 2012
2 posts
6 tags
The Illusion of Progress
Take my hand and let us dive into the wonderful world of my current projects. Take a brief glimpse on the wonders at your feet. First of all, why is this post called the illusion of progress? For understanding it, you need to know what I did in the past weeks. Nothing. I did nothing. Already scratching your head? Ok, let me explain. Sometimes when you’re involved in many projects you...
Feb 11th
4 notes
4 tags
BadPlastic for Mac
Today my friend Gleb Dolgich (@glebd) released his brand new app BadPlastic on the Mac App Store. It’s the perfect tool for tracking your credit card debt and comes with a sexy UI, definitely worth checking out. The about box Gleb is using in here is the one I designed for Ascension 2 (SVEpicAboutBox).  BadPlastic on the Mac App Store
Feb 11th
1 note
October 2011
3 posts
6 tags
AnsiLove.framework
Today I want to introduce you to what I’ve been coding recently. Here is a Cocoa framework for rendering ANSi art, and it’s called the AnsiLove.framework. It uses a modified version of Frederic Cambus’ awesome AnsiLove as library, creating PNG images from ANSi source files. But why? As you may know, I’m busy developing Syntoxic right now but I’m also working on...
Oct 21st
58 notes
12 tags
Farewell, Dennis Ritchie
He was father of the C programming language and without him there would be no UNIX. His pioneering work paved the way for many modern programming / scripting languages like Objective-C, C#, Perl, Java, Go, JavaScript and PHP. Entire operating systems are written in C or build upon the UNIX legacy, most notably BSD and hence Mac OS X. Farewell, Dennis Ritchie… may you rest in peace.
Oct 13th
21 notes
2 tags
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be...”
– Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)
Oct 6th
14 notes
September 2011
2 posts
7 tags
First Syntoxic details
Time to to talk about some key features I have in mind for Syntoxic. Please note the screenshot above is early work in progress, it’s not the final UI. I also have more features on my roadmap I’m keeping secret at the moment. The more Syntoxic gets usable the more I’ll report on it. Okay, here we go: syntax highlighting / syntax coloring for many languages auto-completion ...
Sep 12th
27 notes
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?
Sep 6th
August 2011
1 post
5 tags
Private Properties in Objective-C →
I’m an avid fan of properties and I’m using them as often as possible. Recently someone asked me how I deal with private variables. The answer is: a private property. Initially I wanted to write my own blog post about it, fortunately David Linsin already did this. His approach is very similar to mine so I just share the link with you.
Aug 8th
38 notes
July 2011
1 post
7 tags
Announcing Syntoxic
A syntax highlighting text editor for Mac OS X. Beautiful. Contemporary. All you ever needed. Product availability? When it’s done. 
Jul 15th
32 notes
March 2011
1 post
6 tags
Ascension roadmap
We know Ascension is already great in displaying ASCII art on the Mac. Let’s talk about some of the key features I’m planning for upcoming Ascension releases.  More fonts Ascension comes bundled with a special .dfont variant of the Terminus font, optimized for rendering ASCII artwork on a Mac. It’s a modern font, but what about some retro magic? Among other typefaces, the...
Mar 2nd
58 notes
February 2011
2 posts
6 tags
Feb 22nd
41 notes
5 tags
Feb 1st
32 notes
January 2011
3 posts
4 tags
BWToolKit 1.2.5 w/o private API
I recently forked BWToolKit to make it conform with the Mac App Store guidelines. The current version comes with an element called BWTokenField, which uses NSTokenAttachmentCell and this is private API. In other words: using BWToolKit in your App will result in MAS rejections. Since I decided to use BWToolKit in Ascension (a great enrichment), I created a variant without private API. BWToolKit...
Jan 30th
45 notes
3 tags
AutoHyperlinks Framework R2 →
AutoHyperlinks is a Cocoa framework for hyperlink detection. I forked it once to bundle an optimized variant with Ascension. I recently published Release 2 of my fork, with just minor modifications under the hood. The project compiles now as Intel 32/64 binary to not conflict with the Mac App Store guidelines.
Jan 13th
25 notes
4 tags
Why Apps now? →
Apps are the merger of popular culture and computing. Great post by @Lessien, worth reading.
Jan 13th
December 2010
3 posts
6 tags
Ascension 1.0.3
Ascension 1.0.3 has been released today. You could describe this as a bugfix release, nearly no new features were added. The current build is not beta anymore, I wiped the last issues I encountered and Ascension should run smooth and stable. I’m also working on version 1.1.0 with some significant changes under the hood, most of them affecting the way it handles different encodings and file...
Dec 26th
26 notes
“Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.”
– Steve Wozniak
Dec 11th
6 tags
PXSourceList GC-enabled
As you may know, right now we are very busy in development of FooTweet, our upcoming Twitter client for Mac. It will come with two different UI’s, a compact and extended one, for which we are going to use Alex Rozanski’s awesome PXSourceList control. Unfortunately PXSourceList is not Garbage Collector compatible, until now. I revised the code to make it fully GC-compliant, but it will...
Dec 9th
November 2010
3 posts
7 tags
Ascension 1.0.1 beta 2 is released
I managed to do things even better and released Ascension 1.0.1 beta 2 today. You won’t recognize it at a first glance, but a lot has changed under the hood, thanks to your reports and overwhelming feedback. I’m quite sure the goal of creating the best ASCII art / NFO viewer (and editor) for Mac OS X is already reached. Unfortunately I did neither find time yet to create a project page...
Nov 26th
19 notes
7 tags
Ascension 1.0.0 beta1 is out! →
My ASCII Art viewer and editor for Mac has finally been released. For now Ascension supports NFO, DIZ and TXT files. Of course it can handle Unicode documents. Follow the link to browse the repository and get the beta. I will update my project site here as soon as possible. Let me know if anything is not working as expected.
Nov 26th
4 tags
File attributes with Cocoa
In this basic Cocoa example I’m explaining how to access file attributes with NSFileManager and also a simple way of converting a NSURL to a path. Feel free to share and to use this for your own projects.
Nov 16th
23 notes
October 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Twistori screensaver for Mac
Well, I love Twitter and I love my Mac. Recently I was looking for new screensaver, I felt it was time switch from my iTunes cover artworks to something new. The first thing you will notice when you start searching for Mac screensavers is that most of them are made with Flash. I don’t like Flash very much and I don’t want my Mac in sleep mode with the Flash engine running in...
Oct 30th
33 notes
6 tags
Oct 4th
September 2010
1 post
6 tags
WatchWatch
Screencast of Ascension performing live font color changes. Ascension is my upcoming ASCII art editor for Mac OS X, supporting .nfo, .diz, .asc and .txt files. Quite satisfied with the coding progress, we’re not far from release my friends. A high quality variant (1680x1050) is availabe here.
Sep 29th
1 note
August 2010
6 posts
5 tags
BlackNotes theme for Kiwi →
Just published a custom variant of the Notes theme for Kiwi. It comes with dark colors and a gorgeous design. You can get it at kiwithemes.com, I’m sure you will enjoy this release.
Aug 28th
5 tags
Ascension - along an unknown road
Some people asked if I have a roadmap for Ascension. Will it be more like a viewer or an editor? What features are you going to implement? To be honest, I’m not sure. Primarily I aim to create the best ASCII art viewer around. On the other hand Ascension is already capable of editing and resaving all supported ASCII documents using the proper encoding. I have no plan to drop that support,...
Aug 25th
5 tags
Aug 21st
6 tags
AutoHyperlinks.framework →
Here’s a link to my repository of AutoHyperlinks, a Cocoa Framework that handles URL detection. This is my personal fork, aimed to be an Intel 32/64-bit lightweight variant with an improved codebase and Garbage Collection. I initially forked AutoHyperlinks from the Adium project to bundle a contemporary optimized version of this great framework with my app Ascension. There is a Clang / LLVM...
Aug 10th
2 notes
6 tags
Aug 8th
5 tags
Featured on Softpedia →
My apps Parcel Calculator for Mac OS X and it’s command line variant pcp (Parcel Calculator Portable) are now featured on Softpedia, the encyclopedia of free software downloads. Both have been granted the “100% free” award.
Aug 7th
July 2010
1 post
4 tags
Jul 14th
June 2010
5 posts
5 tags
Jun 30th
1 note
4 tags
A coder's typeface
Programmers will agree when I say: the font is of high relevance. I’m a big fan of “Menlo”, first shipped with Mac OS X Snow Leopard as the new standard font for Xcode. “Menlo” is a modification of “DejaVu Sans Serif Mono”, a definite improvement in many ways. Today I want to introduce you to a great alternative. Some of you certainly heard of the Droid...
Jun 22nd
25 notes
5 tags
Jun 16th
6 tags
Ascension - ASCII art for Mac OS X
Talking about ASCII art always means talking about computer history. This unique graphic design technique is text based art, consisting of pictures pieced together from the characters defined by the ASCII Standard in 1963. A special form called block ASCII (or high ASCII) uses extended chars of the 8-bit Code page 437, invented by IBM in 1979 for IBM PC and MS-DOS. Block ASCII is often referred as...
Jun 3rd
28 notes
3 tags
“The PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it’s changes,...”
– Apple CEO Steve Jobs @ D8 Conference
Jun 2nd
May 2010
7 posts
4 tags
Drop Links with Mac OS X
A known desire: while surfing the web you want to save a specific link for later. I know there are various apps around that support you in this matter but Mac OS X is a very customizable operating system and comes with everything you need. The intension of my tutorial is to show that it’s not necessary to have any application running in the background for said purpose and for a better user...
May 22nd
5 tags
Parcel Calculator 0.3.0 is out!
Finally I found time to finish & publish Parcel Calculator 0.3.0 for Mac OS X, the native Cocoa application for calculating girth, volumetric weight, and for tracking parcels of many common global players. This release is the most comprehensive to date, so you might wonder what’s new. App: A remarkable change is the brandnew tracking module with an integrated parcel library, giving you...
May 12th
7 tags
“The northern ‘wall’ of the room is a shimmering curtain of light. In the center...”
– Zork 2
May 9th
4 tags
Great things to come
Right now I’m busy developing a new Parcel Calculator release (which actually incorporates tons of cool features) but I am also gathering information for some new tutorials. One will explain how to write a command line utility in portable C and the usage of Mac OS X as cross-compilation platform, I mentioned this in an earlier post. There are some great things on the way, can you feel it in...
May 5th
2 notes
5 tags
GitHub adds Subversion write support →
It’s now possible to use SVN tools to collaborate on Git projects. Mac developers are able to use Xcode’s built-in SVN support for their purposes. Overall a nice feature, even tough I still prefer a full-fledged client like Gitti for all Git tasks.
May 5th
4 tags
May 4th
1 note
5 tags
May 1st
April 2010
3 posts
“Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to...”
– Steve Jobs - Thoughts on Flash
Apr 29th
47 notes
2 tags
WWDC10 →
The center of the app universe has been announced.
Apr 29th
4 tags
pcp (Parcel Calculator Portable)
I was gathering information for a “Portability and Cross-Compilation under Mac OS X” tutorial when I came to the conclusion to create a portable version of my Objective-C / Cocoa project Parcel Calculator. Nothing bloated, just a command line utility providing Parcel Calculator’s most common features to users of other platforms than Mac OS X. I decided to use C syntax for this...
Apr 8th
January 2010
2 posts
4 tags
switchtemp.c
Template for a switchable command line utility, written in portable C. Various flags already set, for example -v for version output. Special feature is a customizable switch counter that limits the amount of processed arguments. On this page you will always find the latest variant, code is maintained at GitHub. Feel free to use this code for your own portable C projects, switchtemp.c is released...
Jan 13th