After a long period of silence, we’re happy to announce the release of Cocktails 1.0, 1400+ cocktail recipes in your pocket from the collection of the world renowned CocktailDB.com.

Big ups guys, I know you worked hard on this app. Congratulations on the release!

Basically, you take a music track (or multiple music tracks) and time it to go with a bunch of stills. Meshing the stills with the transitions and the soundtrack is often the most difficult part of this. Animoto makes this pretty simple to do. Just upload an mp3 track and point it at your flickr account or upload you stills. It takes all of these pieces, analyzes the music, and spits out an H.264-encoded clip suitable for download or sharing on YouTube. Incredibly cool, and I know that this is actually a hard problem??for computers to solve.

I generated that with about 5 minutes of effort.??I love to see little webapps that make the complex seem easy, while simultaneously sweating the details of UI.

That being said, I do have a couple of quibbles with it. The completion, while great and very thorough, is often slow and requires navigating a list. For simple snippets, sometimes I’d rather just skip the “pomp and circumstance” and have it just fling some text on the page. This is much in the style of TextMate, another application which I have great love and admiration for.

So far, it’s a one afternoon hack, and it scratches my “itch”. See it in action here in this simple video. It’s BSD licensed and available from github.

Update 1:

After doing a bit more playing with Xcode’s Text Macro system (thanks Gus!), I can see that possible to configure it to be closer to what I wanted. However, some bits are still missing and/or rub me the wrong way.

For example, if one types “pm” (the “#pragma mark completion”) in the file scope, the completion is not suggested until one hits the completion key (usually “Esc”). Another issue is the completely baroque nature of the xctxtmacro file format, especially compared to the ease of writing a TextMate snippet.

As usual, I’m completely open to suggestions on how to improve my Xcode workflow without having to use my unsupported plugin as it’s possible that I’m just missing something.

Update 2:

Doh. Kevin Ballard reminded me about using Ctrl-. to get the first completion out of the list. This goes a long way towards addressing my complaint about immediately getting the first completion available. The only complaint I have left is about the crappy-ness of the xctxtmacro file format and it’s relative lack of documentation.

Update 3:

Added a quick way to add snippets (check the bottom of the Edit menu) and added support for interpolation of the pasteboard’s contents into the snippet.

While you’re at it, check out Marcus’s new blog “Cocoa is My Girlfriend”. Looks like it has a nice little CoreAnimation tutorial on there and a bit about NSOperation*. Both of these are essential APIs for any developer targeting OS X 10.5 Leopard.

A few highlights of this release:

• Directory comparison stability improved.
• Save Original As??????? and Save Modified As??????? in the text diff utility added.
• Cmd+Left and Cmd+Right key shortcuts changed to something more sensible.
• App icon tweaked
• Line matching algorithm accuracy greatly improved.

Changes has a 15-day free and unlimited demo, so why don’t you check it out!

I heard from the developer (who shall remain nameless, but is one of the coolest dudes in the OS X dev community), that the subversion branch you currently want to use is:

http://otx.osxninja.com/builds/trunk/

My Recommendation: You need this tool. Here’s a more in-depth explanation as to why.

Here are some pics from the event taken by Ash Ponders. I look pretty special in the pic he took of me. Not my best photo, but oh well.



It’s so damn good that I keep kicking myself for having shelled out for Photoshop CS3. I won’t make that mistake again. For a Cocoa developer, Acorn can pretty much handle all of the art for my little apps and my website. Version 1.1 rocks even harder.

Congrats Gus!