Posts

Over the past week and a half I’ve been working on getting what I previously had moved to the menu bar. Popping open a window was alright but I’ve always wanted to create a menu bar app and this was a perfect fit. Already, after just a few days of testing, the menu bar pop-up feels a lot nicer than a regular window opening for input.

It wasn’t an easy transition as there was a fair amount of learning to be done and there are many ways to achieve the same general result. Apple added NSPopover in OSX 10.7 but never really intended for it to be used from a menu bar item, so there were/are some quirks that need to be worked out to get it all done. Overall, using NSPopover was a decent solution as it lets the OS handle the pop-up animation, styling and nitty-gritty work. Due to my in-experience, just getting it all working properly was a decent challenge.

Development of Logger-TXT OSX has been coming along since Dev Diary #1 and is at the point that I can use it daily for log input. I still have my primary script around for accessing recent items, search, corrections, and general comfortability, but overall, I have the OSX app in use for all input.

The focus for the past week was getting the preferences window and its various settings to work. This involved getting the following to work:

With some free time that has presented itself in the past month, I’ve decided to clear a few things off my back burner that have been nagging me for a while. One of those things was to learn some Objective-C in order to create OSX and iOS counterparts to my Logger-TXT script. Not everyone enjoys interacting with shell scripts all day so a nice GUI has been a long time coming. Though mobile is a pretty big logging hole at the moment, I figured an OSX app would be an easier place to start.

A while ago I switched to Mutt for all of my email needs. I have a mix of regular IMAP accounts and a few Gmail powered accounts set up. The Gmail accounts have always been a thorn in my side due to an early misconception I had about the All Mail folder and archiving. Below is my initial problem, solution and what I found to be the consistent behaviour of a Mutt + Gmail setup.

Here’s a quick post on setting up Vim for Arduino development instead of using the Arduino IDE. If you’re a heavy Vim user, it can be a bit of a shock to go into a different editor. Thankfully the setup is pretty easy to get this all working with Vim. This post is assuming you are comfortable with how Vim is setup and ideally already have an environment that works for you.