Well, the story with KosmicTask is that I am getting back to serious development this week. I spent the last 3 or 4 weeks getting KosmicQuitter finished and the website kicked into something resembling moderate order. God knows why I decided to try and write two apps at a time. Must be a sign of an unbalanced mind.

I do use KosmicQuitter so I felt justified in adding the following entry to http://osx.iusethis.com

"What can I say. I wrote and I use it.

These sorts of apps probably only work for certain sorts of people. I use it to record my alcohol consumption and find that updating it every day helps me think about how much I am drinking.

It hasn't stopped me drinking, nor will it, but it does mean that there are more days when I go without a drink.

And so, two years after starting to code for OS X, I actually manage to release a product. KosmicQuitter is roaming free.

Admittedly, much of the two years were spent coding the yet to escape KosmicTask or on client work. In fact, if I remember correctly, I started coding KosmicQuitter on the 1st of January 2009 as a result of an unspoken, yet surprisingly sincere, New Year's resolution to try and drink less. In fact, I had hoped to be able to claim that KosmicQuitter was written under the influence of not so much as a molecule of ethanol. But it was not to be.

The Setting

On one of my development machines, which has seen a bit of fiddling it must be admitted, I find that the normal currency symbol for the locale is not displayed (be it £, $ or €). Instead I am presented with the following symbol: ¤.

Now I know that I have seen it before, but where? And secondly, what is it?

Answers:

The seller admin interface to the PayPal site, to me, seems destined to confuse. I always forget how to get to such info as the Account Information, Financial Information and Selling Preferences.

I think the cause of this is the second level menu drop down menu structure. You hover over Profile, say, the options drop down, you don't see what you want so scratch your head and start poking around again.

A good infographic on the benefits of stopping smoking http://www.blisstree.com/healthbolt/files/2007/06/smoking_timeline_2070x....

The original posting is here.

So, I have written a simple, but hopefully effective, html help page for my Cocoa app. I have posted it on my web site and provided a link in my app to access it. The help is all on one page but it's not too large or unwieldy and I like it. Internal links are used to navigate around the page and one click can print the whole thing for those who want a paper copy.

The Apple open source site at http://www.opensource.apple.com has a fantastic browsable repository of open source OS X components. Notables are (check for more recent versions on the source site):

libc - C libraries including stdlib

xnu - the base OS X kernel

objc4 - the objective-C runtime

Modifying strings in nib/xib files is made infinitely easier if you remember to user the Strings editor (cntrl-S) available under the Tools application menu.

There is searching of course and several filter options (object class, object name, value etc).

agvtool can be used to bump the versioning info for your app. In particular it can increment CFBundleVersion entries in info.plist files as well as generating C versioning symbols. This can be especially useful if you have a lot of targets in your build as agvtool can increment the bundle version for all of them.

The agvtool executable can be found in /Developer/usr/bin but there is a bash wrapper script in /usr/bin.

Chris Hanson's blog post has lots of relevant info.

To use it just run the command in the project folder: