If you archive NSDateComponents with NSKeyedArchiver and then unarchive them with NSKeyedUnarchiver they will differ from the original. In the screenshot below you can see a example of this behavior.
What’s happening here? Unset components of NSDateComponents have the value NSUndefinedDateComponent.
enum { NSUndefinedDateComponent = 0x7fffffff };
Apple decided that only screen savers that are compiled for 64-bit architectures and use garbage collection run on Mac OS X 10.6. Read the rest of this entry »
With Mac OS X it’s real fun to write your own screen savers – and moreover it’s quite easy. XCode provides a very good template for non OpenGL screen saver modules, but writing a OpenGL screen saver needs some extra care to be taken.
This is not a tutorial for OpenGL programming and it’s no introduction to XCode. The aim is to show you how to use OpenGL code within Apples ScreenSaverView class. I will walk you through the code step-by-step and explain it.
You can find a littlebit more elaborate example (without source code) of what you can do with this template here. Read the rest of this entry »
I made this Gimp template to create high quality glossy 512×512 px app icons. The different shadow, highlight and border effects are stored in different layers so you can fine-tune the appearance as you like. All you have to do is to put your artwork into the background layer and save the icon as png file. I use this template to create the icons for the QualityQuatsch blog (and of course the QualitätsQuatsch blog) but it’s also perfectly suited to create prerendered icons for your applications.
GlossyIconTemplate.xcf The Gimp version.
GlossyIconTemplate.psd The Photoshop version (exported with Gimp and not tested by me).