Nicholas Riley’s Weblog
Thoughts from a computer science graduate student,
medical student and Cocoa programmer (this week).

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Tuesday, January 29, 2002
 
Andy Ihnatko's Macworld SF report is up, or at least the beginning of it (from last Monday). He updates so infrequently that I almost don't go to his site, but it's so funny and/or informative that I remember every once in a while.

And sitting next to Andy Ihnatko (even if he doesn't know me from a bar of soap :) during the Mac team reunion at MacHack 2001 definitely ranks among the most incredible experiences of my life.

3:47:23 PM | reply []

I really miss Mac OS 9. I miss my Mac responding instantaneously yet predictably. I miss zoom rectangles and a Finder that works.

Onward... 6:27:38 AM | reply []

I was just looking at the screenshot again before I went home and realized I was writing Objective-C in Smalltalk. [ ] is not for messaging, it creates a block. Wow, I am out of practice. 1:31:04 AM | reply []

Yup, they were row and column.

- (void)_singleClick:(unsigned int)row :(unsigned short)column;

I wonder why the authors of Terminal decided to use an empty parameter name like that. I guess it's in Objective-C to maintain compatibility with languages that don't have multipart method names, but they didn't want to use the varargs syntax. AFAIK, Smalltalk doesn't support anything similar... no, it doesn't.

Picture of Whisker

The above picture was inserted with the new "My Pictures" tool. Really good. Does exactly what I expected.

BTW, the browser above is Whisker. I saw Doug Way, its author, at MacHack last year, he was wearing a Squeak t-shirt, great because I couldn't navigate the Squeak website to find out where the downloads were (it's much better now). Aside from showing me where to get Squeak for the Mac, he demoed his browser to me. I was really impressed, as I continue to be when I use it. It does automatic window layout, and uses color coding to great advantage (different classes show up in different hues; different methods within the same class in different shades).

Development tool development really seems moribund. We need more interactive, self-introspective systems like Smalltalk, so people can experiment and build their own tools without needing to make a huge investment. The amount of likely proprietary infrastructure required for a Whisker equivalent in C++ or Java is substantial, and the only people who can do it, they're too busy building another EJB-CORBA-.NET tool of the day for big-ticket corporate development.

But there is hope, at least, in the form of Eclipse. OTI made Envy, an incredible (if somewhat hard-to-use) team development product for Smalltalk and Java. I hope it takes off. 1:26:18 AM | reply []

Got posing working on Terminal.app's TermView class. The method I'm using (by the number of warnings I get at compile time) is not very clean, but it does work. Next thing is to figure out how mouse clicks are routed.

- (void)_singleClick:(unsigned int)fp12:(unsigned char)fp16;

That looks good, but I don't know what the parameters are. Row and column maybe? 12:38:21 AM | reply []


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