InScopeApps {+}

EyeTunes 1.5

Dave — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 07:17:28 +0000

I spent a couple hours over the last couple of days wrapping up some things in the EyeTunes project I’ve been meaning to get to. This involved merging in some forks, reorganizing the project and updating it for Xcode 4 and OSX 10.6 so it’s fully compliant with the AppStore, which has gotten stricter about framework architectures. I also wrote a python script I’ve been meaning to get to ever since I wrote a post about updating EyeTunes. This post is now obsolete because the python script does everything necessary to generate the sdef and header files from iTunes!

Here’s the change log overview of what was updated:

23 Jun 2011; EyeTunes-1.5; David Keegan
* Added support for iTunes 10.
* Updated for OSX 10.6, Xcode 4 and AppStore compliance!
* Switched to the LLVM compiler.
* Added isSmart to test if a playlist is smart.
* Added containsTrack to test if a track belongs to a playlist.
* Added isEqualToTrack to compare tracks.
* Added launch and isRunning to launch iTunes and check if it’s running,
updated by clee who also added a quit method!
* Added addPlaylistWithName to add new playlists, thanks k7d!
* Added deleteTrack to delete tracks from iTunes, thanks k7d!

I also put together a compiled version of the framework that can be downloaded and used in projects without having to build EyeTunes from source.

The move to GitHub

Dave — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 05:50:57 +0000

I’ve been using GitHub for 10 months and love it! Last night I finally transfered all of my bitbucket projects over to GitHub.

The transistion was easy with the help of this blog post from WebOnRails.

I manually transfered the issues over too. There might be an automated way to do this but I didn’t have that many issues on my projects. Except for InAppSettings but it was a good excuse to go through all the issues and condense them.

I’ve deleted all the projects from bitbucket except InAppSettings. I want to keep the original issues around for a while. There are also a couple patches/forks queued up that need to be reviewed and merged. The repository will be removed once the project gets going again, to avoid confusion.

SparkleMotion Tutorial

Dave — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:27:20 +0000

A while back I put together a library called SparkleMotion that makes it easy to create Mac updates using the Sparkle framework. I finally put together a tutorial video showing how it can be used to streamline updating a Mac app.

Smart Objects for Multi-Resolution Icons

Dave — Fri, 06 May 2011 05:27:22 +0000

I just finished watching the updated content from Icon Resource. In it Sebastiaan used smart objects, which I’d never used before so I decided to give ‘em a shot for this icon and I can’t live without them now!

I put together this video with some tips on how smart objects can be used for multi-resolution icons.

ChopShop 2.0 Finally on the App Store!

Dave — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 07:02:13 +0000

It’s taken longer then expected but ChopShop 2.0 is finally on the App Store!

After two rejections, first for private api calls in BWToolkit, then for an absence of a welcome window, ChopShop is finally on the App Store under the Developer Tools category.

We now have 5 apps on the App Store, check em out!

Dribbble – Prospect Portfolio

Dave — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 05:32:54 +0000

Edit: 2 hours after posting this @badeen tweeted about it and @jgarnham drafted me! This is a dream come true! Thanks guys, follow both of them!

I’ve been browsing Dribbble for a while, and even developed Coaches Loupe! However I’m unable to post on Dribbble because I don’t have an account and it’s invite only. I’m relatively new to the design game but I think I have a lot to offer so I’ve put together a “prospect portfolio”!

These icons were originally created for Murky, but were extended and used by MacHg and several of my apps.

16×16 icon of a tractor, I’m really pleased with the clarity of this icon.

Icons created for the Coaches Loupe app.

Blog theme mockup.

Teaser shot of an iPhone app I’m creating with Jonathan Badeen.

If you like these shots and want to see more invite me to Dribbble!

Coaches Loupe

Dave — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 04:58:03 +0000

I was browsing Dribbble a couple weeks ago and came across a post from Ian Tearle of a mockup he’d made for an app to upload shots to Dribbble. This looked like a fun project so I sent him an email and we started collaborating!

In just 2 weeks we had a beta up and running that uploads shots to Dribbble and CloudApp.

Coaches Loupe also lets you set metadata for a shot before uploading it.

Head over to the Coaches Loupe website to find out more and download the beta!

Coaches Loupe is an open source project, fork it on github! Also BBBouncePass is an objective-c library for uploading shots to Dribble, it was created for Coaches Loupe and is open source too!

ChopShop Resubmitted

Dave — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 23:31:15 +0000

ChopShop has been resubmitted, it was rejected for using private APIs.

The private API calls came from BWToolkit, in this post we will be covering what we did to remove the dependencies on this framework.

Split View

BWToolkit has a nice split view widget that allows you to set the color of the divider, minimum and maximum sizes for the panels and how the panels scale as the window scales.

To accomplish this without BWToolkit we subclassed NSSplitView and created a delegate to implement the features we got for free with BWToolkit.

Bottom Bar

This was surprisingly easy to replace because in 10.6 a bottom bar can be added to a window in Interface Builder!

Preferences

BWToolkit has a great way of setting up tabbed preferences, though it is a little finicky at times in Interface Builder. To replace this we used Dave Batton’s DBPrefsWindowController which works great and is really easy to setup!

All in all it only took a couple hours to implement these changes. Another advantage of not using BWToolkit is that it makes the app smaller, BWToolkit ships with a lot of icons that ChopShop wasn’t using.

ChopShop has already been resubmitted and will hopefully be available soon!

ChopShop Rejected

Dave — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 20:19:55 +0000

We just heard today that ChopShop was rejected from the App Store because it used private APIs.

2.5 Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected

ChopShop technicly doesn’t use private apis, but we used BWToolkit for some of the UI elements and this is where the private API calls are coming from.

This is unfortunate because BWToolkit is a great framework that makes it easy to use a lot of standard UI elements that are not directly available.

ChopShop doesn’t rely on BWToolkit for very much so it will be easy to strip it out of the project with no visual differences.

We’ll keep you posted on when the private API free version has been submitted :)

The State of ChopShop

Dave — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:05:58 +0000

@darthapo was wondering on twitter today what happened with ChopShop 1.1. We blogged about this a while back, then after deliberating we decided it would be better to hold off on releasing a new version until it was really perfect.

Here’s a sneak peak at ChopShop 2.0!

We’ve been working on ChopShop 2.0 for a while but other projects keep getting in the way, RockStar for example :) RockStar was our first app on the new Mac App Store, and ChopShop 2.0 will be the next!

We have a checklist of features for the release version and we are working as hard as we can to cross things off the list. One of the things we crossed off the list today was finishing the icon!

Here’s what the original icon looked like:

We wanted the new icon to be more interesting and have depth, here’s a look at the initial blocking:

And here’s the final version we completed today:

This is the Mac App Icon template that will ship with ChopShop 2.0!

Stay tuned for more updates!