Domain of the Bored

Previous assignment of function keys:

This made (some) sense as the explanation for iLife 2008's refusal to allow you to assign these keys to its functions.

New assignment of function keys on otherwise-yummy new keyboards (yes, both of them):

WTF?

* As named in iTunes' AppleScript dictionary. ↶

This bug is iTunes viewport pinned to top of selection when selection is at top of viewport. It was filed on 2007-08-02 at 10:31 PDT.

If you attended WWDC, you can head over to ADC on iTunes and see what you missed.

UPDATE 17:05 PDT: My theories have been disproven by my sharp commenters. See the comments for the true explanation. Thanks, guys!

Quoth the DFLL:

Apple Reports Third Quarter Results ★

…

270,000 iPhones sold in the first two days, and Jobs is quoted in the PR saying “we hope to sell our one-millionth iPhone by the end of its first full quarter of sales”.

Incorrect.

Here's what Apple's unaudited summary data (linked from that press release) says:

So they sold 270,000 of “iPhone and Related Products and Services”. Suppose that all of those are $499 (which we know is false):

499 × 270,000 = 134,730,000

$134M! That's a long way from $5M.

The explanation is in that footnote 6:

(6) Consists of iPhones and Apple-branded and third-party iPhone accessories.

So if you bought an iPhone and a case, you effectively bought two iPhones for the purpose of that column. More accurately, you bought an iPhone (+1) and a Related Product (+1), for a total of +2.

I suspect the real number of iPhones, not counting accessories, is much, much closer to AT&T's 146,000-activations number (since very few people will buy an iPhone and not activate it).

Code signing is new in Leopard, right?

Right?

No, actually; it's much older, as I found out while responding to a question on programming.reddit. In my results for a Google search that I did, I stumbled over a link to TN1176, which mentions the addition of code signing.

TN1176 is the release notes for Mac OS 9.

The technote doesn't actually say much. In fact, I can go ahead and quote it in full:

Apple Code Signing is a new technology in Mac OS 9 that allows applications, plug-ins, and content to be signed by developers. Apple Code Signing Certificates assure your customers of your identity and the integrity of your products. For more information, please see the Mac OS Security and Cryptography Web site.

That site's gone now, of course. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine saved a copy.

Apple Verifier

Apple Signer

The top link on that page is to the Security 2.0 SDK, which includes a lot of stuff relating to code signing. There's a pair of utilities called Apple Signer and Apple Verifier, some API documentation, some sample code, some resource templates (remember those?), a library, and the debugging root certificate.

UPDATE 06:29: Apple Verifier actually comes with the OS, but Apple Signer is only available in the SDK.

If you've ever seen a 'sign' resource while hacking in ResEdit, now you know what it was.

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

Oh, and in case you're wondering what the Signer and Verifier applications look like:

Signer at work.

Signer can also verify.

Result of verification.

These are the certificates from the verification. The root cert is the “Issuer's Certificate” for the other one.

This is why I didn't explain the difference between Apple Signer's Verify command and Apple Verifier: I don't know, because this message comes up when I try to launch Apple Verifier. And no, I don't know why the message comes up.

This bug is hdiutil provides no facility to change bzip2 block-size. It was filed on 2007-05-25 at 13:49 PDT.

This bug is User 501 gets the admin bit after migration. It was filed on 2007-05-25 at 13:29 PDT.

Ordinarily, I'd post this on del.icio.us, but this isn't on developer.apple.com and I don't think del.icio.us allows file: URLs.

Most use of Core Audio goes through Audio Units, but the Audio Unit API has historically been undocumented. Today, I finally found the Audio Unit documentation. Turns out that, rather than being in the /Developer/ADC\ Reference\ Library/Documentation folder (where you would expect documentation to be), it's hidden in the /Developer/Examples folder. This documentation is so good (damn near production-quality) that I feel like I've struck a rich vein of gold ore.

WTF, Apple?

This is a partial list until Friday night, but it's worth posting now because of all the people I met at the WWDC Bash.

Where possible, I've also listed their IRC nickname.

Adium-related people I met at WWDC

• Colin Barrett (cbarrett)
• Brian Ganninger (whom I'd previously met at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit) (bgannin)
• Patrick Gibson (patch writer, not developer) (pblair)
• Elliott Harris (eharris)
• David Smith (Catfish_Man)

Other people I met at WWDC

• Karl Adam (PantherMachina)
• Dave Batton [Added Friday, though I met him before the Keynote]
• Ken Ferry (kongtomorrow)
• Andy Kim [Added Friday]
• Paul Kim (mr_noodle) [Added Friday, though I met him after the Keynote]
• Devin Lane (DevG5)
• Gus Mueller (ccgus) [Added Friday]
• Scott Stevenson [Added Friday; I'd met him previously at CocoaHeads]
• Many Adium fans (thanks for your kind words, everyone!)

Bloggers I met at the WWDC Bash

• Kevin Ballard (Eridius)
• Blake C. (who is apparently a big fan—woot!)
• Steven Frank
• Daniel Jalkut (dcj)
• Jonathan Rentzsch (rentzsch)
• Cabel Sasser
• Jonathan Wight (schwa)
• Dan Wood

Bloggers I met at CocoaHeads

• Scott Stevenson

The audience was SRO, so David and I (along with Devin and Michael Gorbach) just went off to The Studio and hacked code. After the meeting, I went up to Scott, and we shook hands and that was it. My guess is that it was a busy night and he wanted sleep.

People I've seen at WWDC, but did not talk to

• Aaron Hillegass
• Uli Kusterer
• Wil Shipley
• Brent Simmons
• Quinn
• George Warner

People I saw at the WWDC Bash, but did not talk to

• john calhoun
• Martin Ott (I think he saw my Adium shirt and said “look, Adium!”, but it could just be wishful hearing, considering Ozomatli was blaring at the time)
• Some other people I'm totally blanking on

They're calling it “iTunes Plus”, and the current Single-of-the-Week is available in it. Took them long enough—yesterday was the last Tuesday in May, and they didn't even get done with it until today.

Ah, well. At least it's finally here. Woo-hoo!

By the way, you need to update to iTunes 7.2 and agree to the iTS terms and conditions again to turn on iTunes Plus. The actual T&C haven't changed, but the Terms of Sale have.

Compare this translation interface (what I've been using):

Babel Fish (in Camino, because none of my other browsers work with it)

to this one (what I should be using):

I used to hate Sherlock under Mac OS 9—I went so far as to custom-install Find File from Mac OS 8.5. But Sherlock under Mac OS X is pure awesome.

Now, if they kill it in a future OS version, I'll be sad. And I may end up cherry-picking from the old OS disc again.

Anybody who's ever needed to work with virtual key-codes—especially to program a hotkey—has had the problem of looking up the key-code for a specific key. The usual solution is to fire up Peter Maurer's Key Codes.app and press the key, but wouldn't it be nice to look it up in a handy table that you could print out?

There actually is such a table, but it's well-hidden in the Apple documentation. Mac OS X uses the same virtual key-codes that it used for the legendary Apple Extended Keyboard. Thus, the table in Inside Macintosh: Text still applies.

The problem is the asstastic low-resolution JPEG scan of the table that Apple provides in the online version of IM:Tx:

Good luck with that!

So I did some poking. It turns out that there is a PDF version of IM:Tx on the ADC website—complete with a vector, rather than raster, table. Unfortunately, opening a PDF and jumping to figure C-2 is no easier than firing up Key Codes and pressing the key.

So here's a handy-dandy PNG version of the key-codes table, cropped straight from the PDF. It's 600 dpi, so you should be able to print it out on any printer without a problem (and if not, you're welcome to do the same crop procedure yourself). Here's what it looks like:

In case you're wondering, I cropped it by copying the figure in Preview, then pasting into Lineform, which allows me to export to PNG at 600dpi rather than 72.

Here is a rundown of every file format you can use to distribute your software, along with their advantages and disadvantages. They are listed in ascending order of effectiveness.

In case you're wondering, 7-zip and StuffIt X are not listed here because nobody has decompressors for them. I wrote this list for the context of software distribution; the days of saying “You will need StuffIt Expander to open this file” are long over.

I bring this up because, having in mind my objections above to disk images, I released EasyMD5 as a zip archive. I did it this way because EasyMD5 is targeted at Adium users (specifically, those who have problems downloading Adium); experience has proven that I can't assume that an Adium user will know how to deal with disk images. Everybody knows how to handle zip archives (hello, Chris!), so I made it a zip archive.

I hadn't yet done the study of file sizes that I did and published yesterday. Now that I have, later today, I'll replace the zip archive with an internet-enabled disk image.

UPDATE 11:37: Added mentions of Paul Kim's proposal of a runtime check for the disk image nature, and clarified the Lazyweb request.

UPDATE 20:47: Updated to include comments from Sven-S. Porst and Michael Tsai.

…you didn't.

Apple has extended the WWDC early registration deadline to May 11.

1. swab

   swab(3) is a function that copies some bytes from one location to another, swapping each pair of bytes during the copy. Handy for structures.

   It has a feature that isn't mentioned in the Darwin manpage for swab: If you pass a negative size, it does not swap. I have no idea why this magic behavior was added; if you want a swab that doesn't swap bytes, just use bcopy. I shake my head at this use of a magic argument.

2. ntohs, htons, ntohl, htonl

   These four functions swap the bytes of a 16-bit (‘s’) or 32-bit (‘l’, in ignorance of LP64) integer and return the transformed value.

   They are mainly used in network-I/O contexts, as they transform between network byte order (big-endian) and host byte order (whatever you're running). But there's nothing stopping you from using them for any other 16-bit/32-bit integral byte-swapping.

3. OSByteOrder (Darwin)

   The Darwin kernel provides a number of handy-dandy macros for byte-swapping:

   • OSSwap{Const}?Int{16,32,64}
   • OSSwap{Host,Big,Little}To{Host,Big,Little}{Const}?Int{16,32,64}

   The {Host,Big,Little}To{Host,Big,Little} functions swap conditionally; the others always swap.

   According to the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines, it is safe to use these in applications.

4. Core Foundation

   CF's Byte-Order Utilities provide the same facilities as OSByteOrder, with a couple of twists:

   • The implementation uses assembly language when the environment is GCC on either PowerPC or x86. This is theoretically faster than OSByteOrder's pure-C implementation. (CF falls back on pure C in all other environments.)
   • CF adds support for byte-swapping 32-bit and 64-bit floating-point numbers.

5. Foundation

   Foundation's byte-order functions bear all the same capabilities as the CF Byte-Order Utilities. In fact, they are implemented with them.

6. NeXT byte-order utilities

   These utilities are equivalent to the Foundation functions, except that they are implemented using the OSByteOrder utilities. They are declared in <architecture/byte_order.h>.

7. Core Endian

   

   I think that the “Core Endian” name itself is new in Panther. Three functions in the API have a “CoreEndian” prefix, and are marked as new in Panther, whereas the others have simply “Endian”, and are marked as having existed since 10.0. This suggests to me that the entire API was branded “Core Endian” in 10.3, with the older functions subsumed by it.

   The new functions have to do with “flipper” callbacks, which you can install so that things like Apple Event Manager can DTRT with your custom data types. The older functions are plain byte-swapping utilities, just like all the other APIs described here, and exist mainly for the benefit of QuickTime users (they exist on Windows, too, through QuickTime).

This bug is iTunes does not FNNotify after moving items to the Trash. It was filed on 2007-04-13 at 19:56 PDT.

From man strftime:

BUGS

There is no conversion specification for the phase of the moon.

Feel free to share your favorite manpage jokes in the comments. (I'll do one for you: the obligatory tunefs joke.)

ICeCoffEE is an APE extension by Nicholas Riley that lets you ⌘-click on a URL in any NSTextView to open that URL in your favorite browser.

But it has another feature that's far more useful than that.

ICeCoffEE is named after ICeTEe, an extension for Mac OS that also provided the ⌘-click feature. ICeTEe added it to TextEdit (that's the “TE” part; TextEdit was the text-editing control in Mac OS, and it's totally separate from TextEdit.app). But ICeCoffEE has one other feature, which I find far more useful. It's a two-part feature:

1. It adds a Services menu to your contextual menu.
2. And you can edit that menu.

What that means is that rather than having to mouse all the way up to the Application menu, then rifle through an enormous list of services*, you can instead simply right-click on the view that already has your focus, and find the service you want among the set of services that you actually use.

(Before you mention ServiceScrubber: That works by editing applications' Info.plists. Not a good way to go about it. I'd rather have services specifically excluded from the Services menu without having to edit any part of the applications. ICeCoffEE provides this.)

This is pretty big. The major reason why people don't use services—even in the face of ThisService, which is the greatest developer tool since Interface Builder—is having to cross half the screen and then wade through several dozen menu items. ICeCoffEE solves both of those problems, so now you have no excuse not to use the full power of services in your work.

It also lets you put the Services menu in the menu bar, but while that beats having it hidden in the Application menu, I don't think that that's as cool as having it in the contextual menu. Worse, it doesn't let you edit the menu-bar Services menu. The one in the contextual menu is a hundred times more useful.

ICeCoffEE is free and a UB, and works in any Cocoa app. You'll need Mac OS X 10.1 or later, though current versions require 10.3.9 or later.

* My Services menu has 46 menu items in it, and that's counting submenus as 1 each. ↶

Today, I scanned in one of my old drawings: a study of five-pointed stars that I made when I was trying to figure out how to draw a proper star (this was at the time of me working on Keynote Bingo MWSF2007 Edition, and a derivative of the same star is used in TuneTagger).

The odd thing is, after I corrected the image using Preview's Black Point and Aperture controls (no relation to the photo-management program), the image weighed about two-fifths as much:

du -b Five-pointed\ star\ study* %~/Pictures(0) 1403443 Five-pointed star study-adjusted levels.png 3346498 Five-pointed star study.png

(These sizes are after pngout, but even if I re-correct the original image and save it elsewhere, it comes out 1790244 bytes long.)

Go figure.

This bug is iTunes should use real combo boxes in its Info dialogs. It was filed on 2007-04-06 at 23:48 PDT.