A little overshadowed in the developer community by WWDC and all the inevitable ramblings that take place after, the famous Sparkle framework for automatically updating applications has seen an impressive update.

Still in beta, v1.5 introduces several new features including:

• Support for .pkg files
• Support for receiving demographic information from users
• Can update bundles, not restricted to just .app applications
• Minimum system version checking for users
• Garbage Collection
• Better version comparison algorithm
• DSA instead of less secure MD5
• Won’t update if app is running from a disk image

Andy has also taken the time to dramatically simplify the Sparkle site itself, and move the project over to Launchpad for easier development. Be sure to check out this new version to incorporate into your apps to gain the new features.

Sparkle Page

Sparkle on LaunchPad

Web 2.0 has a distinct look and feel. Part of that is a set of gradients and reflections. I’ve been doing reflections in Photoshop for quite awhile now, but I’m always looking for an easier way to accomplish that. I just ran across a site that has the most elegant way to create reflections. It’s a video tutorial, so I’ll try to wrap that up in text as best as possible.

Create a document with your text layer. Duplicate that layer and flip that vertically, pulling the duplicate layer down so it is a reflection under the first. To feather this second lower layer out to make this effect more impressive, use the Square Marquee utility, with a feathering setting of 10px, to select the bottom half of the second layer and then hit delete. This effectively removes most of the reflection, and you can now play with the opacity of that layer to fine tune the effect even more.

Overall, I’m very impressed with this approach and it makes it so much easier to accomplish this task.

Sebastian Sulinski Design

For all the Knoxvillians out there, Pride is returning to East Tennessee this week. There are events each evening this week, leading up to the day long celebration of the LGBT community on Saturday, June 21st, from 3-10 in Market Square. And of course, there will be an after party at Rainbow West.

I will most likely be attending the Thursday night event, which is Sundown in the City. If you’re gay and are going to be there, wear red and show support!

Also, I hope to meet some fellow bloggers from the area at the Saturday event in Market Square. The Lambda Student Union from the University of Tennessee will be there with a table, providing information to allies and meeting people in the community. Look for our table and come up and say hi.

Knoxville Pride 2008

Lambda Student Union

For those who don’t know, WebKit is the open-source version of Apple’s own Safari. Granted, Apple does tack on plenty of useful features that you can’t get in WebKit, but the main performance improvements happen here.

There was buzz during WWDC ‘08 about Safari 4’s 1.61x Javascript performance improvement over Safari 3.1. Even more, it is 4.34x as fast compared to Safari 3.0. That’s very impressive improvements, placing Safari and WebKit out ahead of even the latest version of Firefox, version 3, released just today. Well, if you would like that performance boost today while running Javascript intensive sites, then download the latest nightly build from the WebKit site and have fun!

WebKit Open-Source Project

The lack of HUD controls from Apple in Leopard is a hot topic. The HUD style has picked up quite a following over the last few years, and without an official release of the controls from Apple, developers have been left to their own devices to replicate that style.

The community has been hard at work and before now the most notable project being developed was by the Shiira web browser team, called BlkAppKit.

Tim Davis from Binary Method has been hard at work creating an awesome framework of HUD controls. Unlike the few other kits already out there, BGHUD AppKit does not use images to create the controls. None at all. These controls are beautiful and ready for Resolution Independence. Also worth noting is the shear number of controls already available, the speed with which the developer is creating new ones and the community that is using it, including RealMac Software, developers of RapidWeaver.

Another unique feature to the BGHUD AppKit is theming. Tim has taken an interesting approach to theming the controls to better match your application, if you need something different than the default HUD style. Place your controls on the windows and set the custom class, as you would with any other custom control in Interface Builder. Building and Running the application at this time will show no difference. However, if you initiate an object controller, of either “BGThemeManager” or “BGGradientTheme” and connect the outlet of every control to this object, your controls are now updated. Using the “BGGradientTheme” gives you the default appearance, while using the theme manager lets you customize the controls.

This seems a little tedious upfront, especially if you want to just use the default appearance. However, if you needed to change the overall appearance of your application, instead of subclassing all of these controls, you can simply subclass and use the update theme manager. Therefore, it does pay off in that respect.

My personal recommendation: If I don’t set the outlet on my control to a theme manager, then use the default HUD behavior. That way I don’t even have to worry with it. But, the work put into this framework is phenomenal and it seems that Tim isn’t sleeping until he implements every last single available control perfectly. If you need HUD controls in your project, I strongly believe this is the best framework available. The work is beautiful, it’s under heavy and active development, the developer is responsive to requests, it’s easily theme-able, and all the controls are already Resolution Independent.

Update: Tim has already read the post and really liked my recommendation for simplifying the ThemeManager behavior. Even better, he’s already implemented the change into the framework, so checking out subsequent version from SVN are now more friendly. Check out his blog for more details and to get your copy.

BGHUD AppKit Home

Shiira BlkAppKit

RealMac Software

My previous post on HUD controls in Leopard

For one, the SproutCore website is now back online after being Dugg a couple days ago. And not only that, there is a very good introduction to models, records (including saving and retrieving) and a brief introduction to the local database, called the Store. If you’re interested in developing more full-featured, Desktop like apps for the web, you need to check out the SproutCore framework.

Models Tutorial

SproutCore Site

My Introduction to SproutCore

Objective-J, Cappuccino, and 280Slides.com

My Introduction to Objective-J and Cappuccino

The 17 year old YouTube star, responsible for such amazing songs as ‘My Whole Family (Thinks I’m Gay)’ and ‘Klan KooKout’ is releasing his songs on the iTunes store today. If you haven’t ever heard of Bo, then you must take 5 minutes of your life to browse through his songs now. A comedic genius with a talent for wordplay, Bo doesn’t discriminate and has songs concerning every major minority (my own little wordplay). Check out one of my favorite songs below and check the rest out on YouTube, or at Bo’s website.

Buy the EP on iTunes

Roughly Drafted Magazine has another pristine article examining just why Snow Leopard is a major release of OS X. The analysis is exceptional, with Daniel making such observations as

Throughout the development of Mac OS X, Apple has reexamined the old ways of doing things in UNIX and proposed new architectures. One example is launchd, the process that manages the launching, termination, and supervision of other processes in the system. It replaces a variety of existing process managers including init, rc, inetd, xinetd, atd, crond and watchdogd. Few UNIX vendors would bother to engineer an entirely new way to do things, and if undertaken in the FOSS world, such an innovation would rarely be adopted by enough of the Linux community to ever matter.

and

Rather than expecting each developer to become an expert in the black art of multithreading, Apple has built sophisticated process management into the kernel where it belongs and added language conventions that enable mere mortals to take advantage of a wide variety of different hardware that users might have at their disposal.

Grand Central Dispatch manages processes in a manner analogous to modern networking. Old telephone equipment used to use circuit switching to transmit information over networks; a dedicated circuit path is easy to set up but it is also expensive and potentially fragile. Modern networking uses packet switching, which breaks up data, phone conversations, or video streams into packets and routes each of them independently in a far more efficient way that is also resilient to network outages. Packets get routed around the problems.

For those without a technical background, Grand Central is going to be big. The ‘black art of multithreading’ is not being said lightly. By adding elegant support in Mac OS itself, Apple is enabling developers to take advantage of multicore Macs with greater ease than ever before. The performance improvement in most applications, and indeed in OS X itself, will be available and noticeable immediately. However, just imagine the payoff we’ll see as Intel continues to deliver chips with more and more cores.

Roughly Drafted Magazine

Snow Leopard Teaser

I recently took a quick look at an unreleased web development framework called Cappuccino, which makes use of the newly developed Objective-J language used to deploy the Keynote-like web application 280Slides. Seems there is another very powerful Cocoa-like framework already available, and one that Apple has shown great interest in.

SproutCore adds a MVC (model-view-controller) structure to Javascript. Of course, Cocoa devs will be happy to find the same features noted in Cappuccino, such as undo/redo, bindings, document management, client-side storage with HTML5, and more.

Roughly Drafted Magazine has a very interesting article detailing the implications from this powerful framework. The important ideas to take away from this article lie along the lines that this framework is basically Cocoa for web apps. Apple has already been using SproutCore for over a year in the .Mac Web Gallery, and now has fully deployed SproutCore in the rebranded and revamped .Mac service, MobileMe, in addition to hiring the developer of SproutCore himself. Putting all this effort into the framework and testing it by developing interactive and very Mac-like web applications gives the user the idea that web applications don’t have to suck. So, a new market is emerging.

This is an amazing article with lots of grounded arguments for Apple’s moves, and the industry’s attitude in general. While you’re checking out Roughly Drafted Magazine, be sure to read other articles which are just as amazing!

Roughly Drafted Magazine

SpoutCore Javascript Framework

280Slides Online Presentation Software

I just ran across this site earlier today thanks to a quick link on Twitter. It’s actually a very cool idea. Basically, the creator, Matt James, was listening in on a MacSB (Mac Software Business) and realized just many of the great software titles that he uses are developed by just two people: an insanely great designer and programmer duo. However, he also realized how difficult it was to get started in the business of finding a partner to create this great software, so he create MacYenta to play matchmaker for mac developers.

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