Whew! I just finished a major rewrite on my flash card app, Cerebral Imprint. One of the early design decisions I made way, way back when I first wrote the application (ouch, was it really back in 2004?) was to make it a single document application. The application would store all its information about the user’s data in a single file in the user’s Library directory. This was simple, however as time went on and my personal flash card library grew I realized it just wasn’t going to cut it.

The next thing I did was to hack on support for the application to read and write its flash card data to other files. When the application would start up it would prompt the user if they wanted to open an existing file or start a new one. Only one file could be open at a time but it was the least invasive way to get multiple file support without changing a lot of code (and how the user interface works). It worked but I wasn’t really happy.

Thing is, there is way to this the right way. You base your application off NSDocument and Cocoa provides all sorts of functionality for you. It was really bugging me that Cerebral Imprint wasn’t acting like a normal document-based application for the Mac should behave so I decided on perhaps a overly drastic course of action – I started from scratch with a totally fresh NSDocument application and imported code as I needed from my old project. It took a lot of time but ultimately it was worth it since as I imported the old code I took the opportunity to scrub cruft going back in some cases to 2004 that was no longer being used and really clean things up.

I also added some new functionality along the way. For instance, I’ve been playing around with flash cards apps on my iPhone but haven’t felt like tackling writing an iPhone app right now so I’ve added export functionality so I can export my cards into apps like Notecards to tote with me.

I’ve been taking another stab at dualbooting my Macbook1,1 with the release of Ubuntu 9.04. As a mostly-happy Macophile, why dualboot you might ask? A couple of things – a weakness for playing around with Unix operating systems (a bad habit I picked up in college) and freakin Java 1.6. The problem is Apple decided not to release a 32bit version for 1.6 and my Macbook is the older Core Duo version and thus not supported. Now, normal people might sigh and stick to 1.5 or take this as an opportunity to buy a new laptop. The slightly more practical (or cheap) who refuse to give up probably turn to soylatte, the port of BSD to OS X (Metal L&F only – no pretty Mac L&F). I, however, with more disk space than sense, turned to rEFIt to set up a dual OS X/Linux setup.

I won’t detail how to setup a dualboot system, there are enough tutorials out there if one searches for them. When I first setup my laptop I installed ubuntu  8.10 and quickly ran into  two annoyances  – an error message about my keyboard layout and the fact that by default the machine is very hard to use since the touchpad causes the cursor to jump around randomly while typing. Not in a mood to research them at the time, I got distracted and sadly it wasn’t until 9.04 that I tried again. Both these problems persist with Jaunty so if you want to run it on your it on your macbook, you are going to run into them.

The first issue manifests itself as an error message stating “Error activating XKB configuration” everytime you log into X. This is related to xorg not apparently knowing what to do with the macbook keyboard variant – there is an umbrella bug ubuntu uses to capture all these types of errors you can find here. The solution is to modify your xorg.conf file to give X more information however I haven’t dinked around with this yet since its just a minor annoyance.

The issue with the trackpad just about renders the machine unusable for anything but the most simplist tasks however its luckily easy to fix (or at least mitigate). In Jaunty, just add a startup application that looks like this:

syndaemon -d

This will start up a program in the background every time you login that will disable the trackpad while you type, preventing it from causing the cursor to jump all over the screen. Syndaemon has a couple more options you can play with such as how long to disable the trackpad for but so far I’m finding the default settings to work ok.

A couple more random hints:

• If you upgraded Jaunty and are now having problems with flash sites like Hulu telling you need flash 9 when you _know_ you had flash installed, try using synaptic to complete remove and then reinstall the flash-installer package – thats what it took for me  to get it working again on my living room media box.

• If you are a quicksilver addict, check out Gnome Do – very slick and the keyboard shortcuts are even the same by default.

I’ve been working a lot on my flashcard application behind the scenes lately doing things like switching over to cocoa bindings, messing around with UI, adding little features here and there. I went through a drawer phase for a while but thankfully regained my senses and ripped them all out.

I went ahead and cleaned up the code enough that I’m not *totally* embarssed for other people to check it out so I added a page dedicated to the application as part of my wordpress site and added the source code to a free subversion hosting service (www.assembla.com).

Its been over a year, but I’m working on Cerebral Imprint again.
My first goal – make it so it doesn’t look like, well, ass (pardon my french). When I first started working on Cerebral Imprint I was a fresh switcher from a windows world and the only user interface work I had done in a while was swing based. Now that I’ve been a Mac convert for quite some time I find the user interface to be somewhat of an embarrassment. So, what do you think about this layout?

Its going to be a little bit before I have a new test version ready but stay tuned. My goal is to actually stabilize the code base, release a 2.0 release, then actually start to add new features again.

Hey, looking for a nice list of some of the more popular open source apps out there for the mac? Why not check this site out…
PS – Saturday rocked. I just had to tell someone, but shhh, don’t tell anyone. Its between just you and me, promise?