Mad about Google Maps

This thing is brilliant. I'm home-hunting in the San Francisco peninsula, over the Web, using only craigslist, Google Maps, and their inspired confluence. Two enquiries made. I found a number of cool ones that I've had to disregard:

• Room available NOW at the Center of the Universe!:
  
• This gorgeous loft, complete with the guy's 350 DVDs, his Mac, and his turbo Volvo
• The perfect location, cool apartment, and sounds like a nice person… it's even cheap. Pity it's 6 months only and starts June 1st.

This is a fun, interesting, and draining process.

Posted at 2005-05-04 12:12:32 by Richard • Link to Mad about Google M…
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Discouraging Tiger

Michael Tsai's notes about Tiger are quite discouraging.

• Mail is damn slow
• Spotlight is slow and misbehaves
• I get the impression that things keep snagging, getting in the way. E.g. Safari's dodgy caching, things forgetting passwords (which I've read several people complaining about).

Here's looking forward to 10.4.1 before I upgrade….

Meanwhile, the new OmniWeb beta seems to lock up when loading my saved workspace. *sigh*

Posted at 2005-05-04 08:57:50 by Richard • Link to Discouraging Tiger
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Localization and plugins

This is a bit of Google-food for Cocoa developers looking to do localisation (localization) on plugins. Apologies for constantly switching between US and UK English; it's for Google's benefit, and because Apple use ‘z’.

So, you read the tutorial and you try something like this:

#define SAVE_KEYWORDS NSLocalizedStringFromTable(@"Save keywords", @"My localization file", @"Save keywords alert title.")

… but your localised strings don't appear in the app! How puzzling. They're there in the file, the file is being copied to the right place, and they key is right.

Aha! It's looking in the main application's bundle — in my case, iPhoto. Because I do a few localisation calls, I set a variable to the plugin bundle:

NSBundle *_exporterBundle = [NSBundle bundleWithPath:[[[NSBundle mainBundle] builtInPlugInsPath] stringByAppendingString:@"/iPhotoRDF.iPhotoExporter"]];

then we change the localisation macro to

#define SAVE_KEYWORDS NSLocalizedStringFromTableInBundle(@"Save keywords", @"My localization file", _exporterBundle, @"Save keywords alert title.")

Voila! Easy localisation.

Posted at 2005-05-04 03:12:33 by Richard • Link to Localization and p…
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Kittenwar

I just spent far too much of my precious morning time clicking on pictures of kittens. It's a feline AmIHotOrNot.

And I just wasted even more time blogging it. It's all for your benefit, Tim and Di! :)

In other news, my iPhoto RDF exporter is rapidly approaching usability.

Posted at 2005-05-04 00:33:22 by Richard • Link to Kittenwar
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