paulofierro.com

Dropbox beta includes some sweet new features

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:16:26 +0200

I absolutely love Dropbox. Its such a fantastic service, that in case you're not familiar with it, runs in the background and seamlessly syncs your folders with their servers so you always have a backup. On top of that you can share folders (or others can share with you) which makes working with others really easy, without having to resort to things like source control. They also have clients for Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry (coming soon). Amazing.

However one of my main gripes with it is that it creates a Dropbox folder in your home directory and absolutely everything within that folder gets synced. Stupid simple, but I sometimes had files or folders I didn't really want to sync either because they're already in source control or its a folder with tons of heavy assets that put a real dent into my 50GB account limit.

The other was that I couldn't stop it when I was on a slow connection like a 3G data card - your only option was to kill the app.

Turns out I'm not alone! People asked and the friendly folks at Dropbox delivered. From version 0.8.91 onwards you can do both of these things. When you click on the icon in the menu bar you'll be presented with the option to pause, like so:

The great thing with this is that it continues to index the files on your machine so it knows what to sync once you resume syncing. Under the advanced tab you now also have the option to do a "Selective sync" where you can uncheck folders from being synced. Awesome! You'll also notice new icons in the Finder.

The latest beta version (at the time of this post) is 0.8.97 can be downloaded here, and includes all these goodies. If upgrading from an earlier version it might take a little while to upgrade the database at first but its worth it.

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pfierro — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:05:56 PDT

Sorting numerical NSStrings by playing with C

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:32:28 +0200

The other day I was trying to sort a list of value objects by their ID. I know, not very exciting, but easy enough right? Except these are numbers that are typed as NSStrings. So basically the object looks something like this:

@interface MyObject : NSObject { NSString *objectId; // Other properties would be defined here }

I tried various things, such as sorting the list using a NSSortDescriptor like so:

NSSortDescriptor *descriptor = [[NSSortDescriptor alloc] initWithKey:@"objectId" ascending:YES]; NSArray *orderedList = [list sortedArrayUsingDescriptors:[NSArray arrayWithObject:descriptor]]; [descriptor release];

However that ordered the 12 items as 1, 11, 12, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Not quite what I wanted. After some digging I found a lovely function that would do this, like so:

NSArray *orderedList = [list sortedArrayUsingFunction:compareObjectsUsingNumericalStringId context:@"objectId"];

The C function is quite straightforward:

static int compareObjectsUsingNumericalStringId(id p1, id p2, void *context) { // Create a selector for the object's property SEL methodSelector = NSSelectorFromString(context); // Get the value id obj1 = objc_msgSend(p1, methodSelector); id obj2 = objc_msgSend(p2, methodSelector); // We know objX is an NSString so get the int value for comparing int v1 = [obj1 intValue]; int v2 = [obj2 intValue]; // Do the comparison if (v1 < v2) { return NSOrderedAscending; } else if (v1 > v2) { return NSOrderedDescending; } else { return NSOrderedSame; } }

And now the ordered items are 1, 2, 3, 4, etc as we would expect. One of those things that I'm sure I'll find useful in the future so better to leave it here where I can find it :) You can download an Xcode project here that shows this example in action.

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pfierro — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:31:46 PDT

"And lest we forget, Adobe can barely write Objective-C apps themselves."