echo ))) location

one of the things that starves on my to do list as well as in real life is the news feed (rss or atom, whatever) for my companies homepage. I started one using BBEdit and soon - or exactly after one entry - forgot about it again. It regularly resurfaces when it could come in handy... but then I decided against updating. Main reason here is the missing RSS Editor. This weekend I just had finished adding KML support to bcAdmin 2. What has KML to do with RSS you may ask. Most yet know, it is both XML. I learned how to use NSXML* objects to deal with XML maintenance and creation. ecoFeed will soon be published publicly - and it already works for me. Sorry, no feed yet, but soon!

With the advent of iPhone and Leopard CALayer - or whole layer trees - often get used in favor of NSViews. The CALayer and its subclasses offer many convenient ways of getting data displayed quickly and - since we all like eye candy - with subtle and less subtle animations. Blending in or out datasets of a complex graph using a fade effect for free is just nice. While revamping bcAdmin, my biggest application so far, I decided to make use of layer trees to display calls of bats, activity diagrams and the such. After getting into the way layers are hosted, drawn and animated, I had all the tools to write classes for graphs like I never was able before. Or not that easily at least. I need a print out. ... ... which was easy to get from a NSView. Not so easy from a view hosting (in any kind) layers. The images produced with the connivence methods for printing - the ones I used all the years before - produced rather empty images... Not finding a quick solution at first, I started to write ...

Just rediscovered my blog here and decided that all my other attempts of blogging have failed I will restart from scratch here... no out of cheese error. So, in context to one of the other posts here - once again a new cat. I already had a lot of experience due to available developer seeds and have now switched all my Macs to 10.6. So far I am happy, my own apps as well as all the apps I am using on a regular basis are working just as expected. What I like most is that I finally can switch all my developing to Xcode 3.2 and make built-in use of CLANG. More on that in a couple of days. In short - it is nice to have it in the development environment without the need to run terminal commands and such.

still alive and kicking, despite all rumors

settin up my newly arrived MacBook Air :-)

... a new cat is ordered. This year I waited until the cat was released, did not preorder, only order fast enough to get free shipping. Let's wait now...