After over a dozen years working with speech on the Mac, I now find myself looking forward, looking at options and opportunities. Having weathered all the ups and downs in a small company, broken the trail to bring real speech recognition to the Mac and created a very successful (and award winning!) product line, ridden it out through the acquisition by a rather large corporation. And then working to adapt a team into that much larger picture, well.. Nuance and I have parted ways.

What I find most interesting was my initial ‘morning after’ reaction, I woke up thinking about various UX items on upcoming features that need my attention, how to balance the value of sandboxing with the needs and value of interapp communication. And continuing to ponder what new directions Apple is going to go with Siri. Old habits die hard, don’t they?

And now it’s time to set aside some of those more specific habits and consider what’s next..

Requisite Documentation

Ok, nasty unwanted stuff has been removed, maybe this is something I can spend some time on for a while again.

I think so.

I expect that 10.5 might change some things with windows *wink, wink* but this is probably still a useful class. Once 10.5 has shipped I’ll try to find some time to revisit this and make sure it behaves correctly.

Until then here it is – 2 significant changes:
1 – toolbars are maybe really actually finally at last working correctly, possibly
2 – separate gradients for top and bottom borders
3 – thanks to Mark Hill’s example, gradients are drawn directly into the bg image
4 – the files have been cleaned up
(the astute will note that I don’t really feel 2 of the items above are significant, that might as well be left as activity for the reader)

Note: In order to avoid extra work from adding a second gradient, I chose to break the old API (just a little bit). So this is not a drop in replacement but you will know that right away.

Latest StyledWindow

Might be an interesting approach to life. When overwhelmed by something, just bail.

Why can’t I just have some kind of substitution token for my App name in my menus? It would be so nice if this was just handled for you. Or even just use preprocessor macros. Or something so I don’t have to build things programmatically.

I’m working on a project which produces various targets, why would I want a separate MainMenu.nib for each target, when except for the App name they are the same (or at least nearly so).

So here’s what I did in my AppController’s AwakeFromNib:

NSEnumerator *menuEnumerator = [[[NSApp mainMenu] itemArray] objectEnumerator];
id menuItem;
  while (menuItem = [menuEnumerator nextObject]) {
    if ([menuItem hasSubmenu]) {
      NSEnumerator *subMenuEnumerator = [[[menuItem submenu] itemArray] objectEnumerator];
      id subMenuItem;
      while (subMenuItem = [subMenuEnumerator nextObject]) {
        NSString *menuTitle = [subMenuItem title];
        [subMenuItem setTitle:[[menuTitle
            componentsSeparatedByString:@"NewApplication"]
            componentsJoinedByString:[[NSProcessInfo processInfo] processName]]];
      }
    }
  }


Maybe you’ll find a use for it somewhere.

StyledWindow now plays properly with Toolbars.

Download

iWeb:

[styledWindow setBorderStartColor:[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.7686 alpha:1.0]];
[styledWindow setBorderEndColor:[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.5922 alpha:1.0]];
[styledWindow setBorderEdgeColor: [NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.2510 alpha:1.0]];


iMovie HD & iDVD:

[styledWindow setBorderStartColor:[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.7686 alpha:1.0]];
[styledWindow setBorderEndColor:[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.5922 alpha:1.0]];
[styledWindow setBorderEdgeColor:[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.2549 alpha:1.0]];


iPhoto:

[styledWindow setBorderStartColor:[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.7686 alpha:1.0]];
[styledWindow setBorderEndColor:[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.5922 alpha:1.0]];
[styledWindow setBorderEdgeColor:[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.4039 alpha:1.0]];


iTunes 7:

[styledWindow setBorderStartColor:[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.7725 alpha:1.0]];
[styledWindow setBorderEndColor:[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.5882 alpha:1.0]];
[styledWindow setBorderEdgeColor:[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0.2510 alpha:1.0]];


You can use the Demo App to figure out the heights of the borders.

Those that know me know that talking about stuff isn’t usually a problem, so I’ll just need to work on the discipline of writing about stuff.

But this will really just be a post about posting… not quite. I forgot I had something to share.

And a little workflow you might find useful. I got annoyed about the number of steps required to get an Xcode project posted, so I built an Automater workflow: “Archive Xcode Project”.

Just put it in ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder/ (create the path if needed) and you can control-click on an Xcode Project folder and get a nice clean archive ready for distribution. It strips .svn dirs, Build dirs and [username].* foo from your projects and then zips. Nice clean archives for sharing with friends and family.

Download

Download

Update: rev’d to remove .DS_Store files and “build” (in addition to “Build”) folders

Everyone loves the glossy table top reflections in iChat’s video conferencing. Right? Ok, you have to at least admit that you like showing it to your Windows using associates.

So here’s my contribution to virtualizing real life: a category on NSImage that provides you with a reflection of an image. And it comes with a spiffy Demo App so you can fine tune it to get just the right amount of reflection without having to recompile every time.

Download and Enjoy