The great thing about this blog is I get to write about things in my applications that would otherwise remain shrouded in mystery and pretend that they are important.

Take the “Insert Image” toolbar icon in Feeder – you’d be amazed the lengths we at Reinvented Software will go to source an image. The icon is actually a scaled-down and cropped version of the photo shown below, taken at the beach in Corona Del Mar, Orange County, California in Summer 2002.

When it came to doing this toolbar icon, I was looking for a real photo to use and originally wanted a sunset or something similar to iPhoto’s icon. Although I have similar shots, some also from the same location, none of them seemed to work as well as this.

From BBC News:

The BBC is making 20 more radio shows available for listeners to download onto their digital music players. […] The programmes which will be made available as podcasts are mainly talk-based to avoid problems over music rights issues.

I reckon that one of the most underrated features of the Mac is (still) AppleScript. If you don’t already know, using AppleScript you can record and automate tasks, extend existing functionality, tie applications together and – using AppleScript Studio – even create proper standalone applications.

Here’s how it helped me lately and re-whet my appetite for adding AppleScript support to Feeder (I know, it should have been there in the first place, but it got postponed).

With Feeder, a common support problem is the FTP publishing. Not once since I replaced the CoreFoundation FTP stuff with cURL has one of these problems been an actual bug; it usually comes down to whether or not FTP Passive Mode is in use or something that I will politely term “user misunderstanding”. 😀

A big part of support is to get information from log files (e.g. your Console log or a crash log) to work out what is going on. With the FTP stuff, you don’t want to be logging all the time and Feeder doesn’t have a transcript window like real FTP clients, so I added a hidden preference to enable and disable this logging as needed.

You may already know that you can view and change an application’s preferences using the “defaults” command in the Unix shell. For example:

Using the command-line is a bit scary for many users, so I wrote a quick AppleScript to toggle Feeder’s “FTPDebug” hidden preference. You can download it here.

The script was saved as an application, so to run it you just double-click its icon. If you’ve never seen AppleScript and would like to see the code, just drag it to the Script Editor’s icon in your /Applications/AppleScript folder. You will see that it is almost English.

Yes, there’s stuff like VBScript and you can write Unix shell scripts, but I don’t think any other platform has anything as easy and powerful as AppleScript.

Hans asks “What age do you act?“. This is timely considering that I am now 30 + 1 day. I could do with some cheering up…

That I appear to act 6 years older than Hans but 4 years younger than my age sounds about right. Also, Claire told me last night that I looked 26 and (just in case that could be considered too complimentary) would probably look much younger if I didn’t smoke. Thanks! I think.

I am 30 years old today, born on a snowy afternoon in the middle of April 1975. It doesn’t usually snow in April in the UK and that was followed by one of the hottest summers ever. Today, the weather is thankfully a little better, but not much!

It’s a strange birthday; no “life begins at…” type sayings or other things to make you feel better, and now I will have to get used to choosing another option on pop-ups like this:

So instead, I find myself approving of pop-ups like this:

Everyone is being very kind, speaking softly, almost sympathetic. Indeed, you can sense the compassion. “Poor boy,” they must be saying amongst themselves, “he’s 30 today”.

But it’s OK. I’ve come to realise I’ve barely completed the first act. Not everything in my world is rosy at the moment – when is it ever? – but I’ve never been so happy and get the feeling the best is yet to come!