dev:OSX

Unit Testing with Cocoa and XCode

Ever wondered how to start putting unit tests into your Cocoa projects? Well, look no further! In this 10-minute screencast, I show you how to set up your project, how to add test cases and assertions, and how to execute the tests.

Enjoy.

The Apple doc to read with all this info is right here.

Geolocation with Mobile Safari on an iPhone

Hi there. I have put up a four-minute screencast showing how to take advantage of the new geolocation capability in Safari on the iPhone. Web apps for the iPhone get a bad rap for not being "native," but think about how many amazing web applications you can do if you know the exact location of the user of the app.

Enjoy.

How to Add an Icon to an OS X Application

Today I've done a screencast showing how to add an icon to your Cocoa application.

Try it, you'll like it!

iPhone Meets Backpack Journal

Today, a screencast I made about a cute little iPhone app I just whipped up to post entries to my Backpack Journal. The purpose of this example is to show how easily you can access any web service from within an iPhone application.

Backpack Journal with Quicksilver

Even though Quicksilver is on life support, I still love it and depend on it and continue to find amazing things it will do.

I was playing around with the Backpack API and realized that posting to the Journal was a perfect job for Quicksilver. So naturally, I wanted to record a screencast. ;-)

Here's the AppleScript template you'll need to do this on your own machine:

Download journal.scpt (6.9K)

phonecast: UITextFieldDelegate

In the spirit of sharing, here is my first instructional video for the iPhone. It's just a quick 4.5 minutes about how to make a UITextFieldDelegate in order to dismiss the onscreen keyboard.

CocoaShot: SpeakLine, Another Simple Cocoa App

Here is the first installment of something I'm calling CocoaShots; It's as much Cocoa coding as I can cram into Jing's five-minute video limit.

For this episode, I build the application from chapter four of Aaron Hillegass's excellent Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. It shows you how to invoke OS X's speech synthesizer to speak a line of text from a text field.

Let me tell you, those five minutes go fast when you're trying to get an application up and running. Please forgive me the typo at the end. I think this was around the tenth take!

Zach on ack

I must endorse a new tool called ack, which is a grep-like search tool written in Perl that knows about svn and cvs directories and ignores them for the purposes of the search. It is designed with large source file repositories in mind. Here's a two minute demo. Get it! http://petdance.com/ack

The Amazing Levelator

When I made my last screencast, I used iMovie HD for some slick editing, but I wound up with some really uneven sound levels between my voice on the microphone and the music that comes built-in with iLife. I tried to ride the gain a little in iMovie, but since I was using headphones, I ended up overestimating the intelligibility of my voice.

I had been meaning to check out the Levelator for some time now, so I downloaded it. It's a convenient converter for AIFF or WAV files that levels out inconsistencies in sound levels. It came out of Doug Kaye's Conversations Network and at a low low price of zero it's a generous gift to the podcasting/screencasting community.

The only problem for my purposes is that the Levelator takes files in WAV or AIFF format. You can't drop a movie into it, so I had to follow a few steps:

1. Extract the audio track from my movie in QuickTime Pro.
2. Export the audio to AIFF, also with QuickTime Pro.
3. Put the AIFF through the Levelator.
4. Open the new Levelated AIFF back in QuickTime Pro.
5. Export the AIFF with AAC compression (the AIFF is uncompressed, so it's kinda big).
6. Open the new Levelated and compressed audio in QuickTime Pro.
7. Replace the bad audio track with the fresh audio track and save.

Here's a (crude) demo of the process powered by Jing:

This process is, of course, just screaming out for automation. Stay tuned, I'll come up with something. Meanwhile, enjoy a much better-sounding Cocoa Application Tutorial.

Cocoa Application Tutorial

Since the world is new with Leopard, I decided to do a walkthrough of Apple's basic Cocoa Application Tutorial. In this screencast (just under half an hour) I show you step by step how to build the tried and true Currency Converter.

All the screencasty goodness is right here. Let me know what you think; I'd like to do a lot more of these.