Angus Thinks

Month: October 2008

  • Cinema Audio

    A Fascinating Video with Ioan Allen of Dolby Labs talking about different kinds of Film audio system.

  • Is the iPhone NDA still in effect?

    This post from yesterday on the cocoa-dev list seems to suggest that it is.

    I wonder what is happening?

    (Although it doesn’t affect me much because I’m still not doing iPhone development at all yet)

  • XCode function popup

    I love the XCode function popup, particularly in Objective C, because I can add #pragma mark comments to divide up the list.

    Unfortunately languages that aren’t C derived don’t offer #pragma, so I missed these little dividers

    Then I noticed that a comment that contained FIXME had appeared in the list too, looking just as if it were a #pragma mark entry

    Looking at the XCode documentation reveals that XCode will also search code comments for a range of keywords and use them to control entries in the function popup. And it will do this for Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby (as well as the C based C, Objective-C and C++).

    This means I can write in other interesting languages and still get my function popup dividers.

    Just prefix the comment line with one of the following:

    • MARK:
    • TODO:
    • FIXME:
    • !!!:
    • ???

    and the remainder of that line will appear in the list.

    There is more in the Apple Xcode tools documentation

    (It looks like there has been some discussion of this already (1,2,3)

  • SQLEditor releases

    This is another quick update about SQLEditor releases in the near future.

    1.4.2b1

    Currently version 1.4.2b1 is in beta release, it offers a few specific improvements

    • Added support for editing MySQL character set and collation settings on fields and tables
    • Modified inspector on fields to use popup menu for selecting tabs
    • Fixed bug that prevented saving files after creating new foreign keys when referencing primary keys in tables with indexes under certain circumstances.

    1.4.2b2

    1.4.2b2 is due fairly soon. The following improvements should definitely appear

    • Modified MySQL exporter to use ENGINE instead of TYPE for better compatibility
    • Comments now attached to fields when exporting MySQL
      (i.e COMMENT ‘xyz’ style)
    • Connector inspector is now displayed automatically when a new connector is created
    • More padding added to line click detection to make it easier to click on connectors
    • Better parsing of comments attached to mysql field

    There is also a bug relating to identifying objects in Postgresql when there is no schema when using some versions of that database system.This is currently planned to be included but hasn’t actually been finished yet. If the work on this bug gets completed this week it will appear in 1.4.2b2, otherwise it will get pushed to the next release.

    I think that’s everything that’s coming in the near future, there are some other things that I’ve been working on, but they’re more long term (mainly for 1.5), so not much to say yet.

  • National Lighthouse museum closed

    I was sad to read that the National lighthouse museum in Penzance appears to have closed.

    It was an interesting place to visit and it had lots of real exhibits including light house lamps, optics and models. It was also in a building which had been used to prepare stone work for the Wolf Rock lighthouse construction, so there was a sense of history about the place.

    Hopefully the exhibits will get put on display somewhere else, but it’s still a shame.