Mac Daddy World

We rolled out a cool new version of DockStar on Christmas day. The feature everyone’s talking about is the clickable indicators in the menu bar.

Before I was even finished coding this feature, I already knew I couldn’t live without it. Glen used more explicit terms; something leading to him and the new feature having babies.

In short, you can see unread counts for any mailbox or folder up in the status area, and a simple click on the indicator pops open Mail.app and brings up the right mailbox. This was a requested feature from DockStar fans. (We get a lot of our best ideas from customers.) It’s not limited to unread counts either: You can set each indicator to count flagged messages, total message counts, and even monitor Smart Mailboxes.

This upgrade brings many new features for Leopard users. If you use To Do items in Mail.app or Calendar.app, you can use DockStar to monitor the number of incomplete To Dos. You can also count Notes or even keep track of unread RSS feed items.

The DockStar Dashboard Widget also got some improvements. You can now click on the widget to jump right into the relevant mailbox.

If you’re a serious emailer, and you’ve never tried DockStar, you should try the free trial, but be warned: Afterwards, you won’t be able to live without it.

I created an application to manage installed QuickTime Components. You can see all installed components and enable/disable components.

I’ll share it here:
QuickTime Component Manager

Instead of using FindNextComponent to find thng resources (like Fiendishthngs), QuickTime Component Manager scans the Library/QuickTime and Library/Components folders in each domain and analyzes each file.

If people find this useful or have suggestions for features that would make it more useful, please let me know and we can continue to work on it.

After a very long development cycle, we released iGlasses 2 on August 27th. The new version has so many exciting new features; my favorite being the ability to digitally pan and zoom your camera (and even cooler, this can be accomplished using the Apple Remote!). Another really nice feature is the precise control over the built-in iSight’s brightness and the ability to lock the iSight’s auto exposure.

Amazingly, we’ve had only a few bug reports and they are very minor problems. With software, major updates are usually followed by a point release udpate in less than 48 hours. (I’m looking at you iTunes.) Not so with iGlasses 2. However, iGlasses 2.0.1 will be coming at some point to fix those minor issues.

Probably the worst bug is that iGlasses 2 causes a crash for 10.3.9 users when they run the Bruji apps (DVDPedia, BookPedia, etc.) We always feel terrible when our plugins cause pain to other developers. We do try to test every situation and we do run a beta progam but somehow we missed this one. The cause of the crash is interesting:

Watch out for duplicate class names

It’s a rare problem, but you can run into duplicate Objective-C class names when the dynamic linker is loading bundles at run-time. It turns out that iGlasses and __Pedia both used the excellent and free AppleRemote library by Martin Kahr. It’s an Obj-C class wrapper around the Apple Remote, which makes it really simple to use a remote in your app. Since neither Bruji nor iGlasses changed the name of the class, the dynamic linker gets an error when trying to load iGlasses.

Now, typically, this won’t cause a crash. The linker will print an error message and then continue, using only one of the two available classes. (This would cause immediate problems if the two classes were actually different internally.) Even though these two classes were probably identical, in this case 10.3.9 doesn’t deal with it so well. This is what we found in the system.log (absolute pathnames and other nonsense removed for readability):

Bookpedia: objc: Both Pediabase and iGlasses have implementations of class AppleRemote.
Bookpedia: objc: Using implementation from iGlasses.
Bookpedia: objc: thread is already initializing this class!
crashdump: Started writing crash report to: Bookpedia.crash.log

Yikes! The lesson? NEVER use simple class names! Always use some unique company or library prefix, even for classes you’re borrowing!
The easiest thing to do in this case is to just use a macro in your prefix file like this:

#define AppleRemote ECAppleRemote

Just a heads up if you depend on your Logitech webcam microphone. Wednesday’s awkwardly named 10.4.10 update breaks the USB microphone support for the latest family of Logitech cameras (Fusion, Ultra Vision, Notebooks Pro, Pro 5000). They simply no longer show up as an audio device. Older QuickCams such as the STX and the original Notebooks Pro are not affected. We hope this will be fixed shortly, as Apple actually sells the Fusion on Apple Store.