Brent and I finally were able to submit our first iPhone application. It’s a simple yet elegant chess clock that can satisfy most of the chess matches out there.

Eidetic Software’s Website:
http://www.eideticsoftware.com

The iChessClock is available at the Apple AppStore

I have been looking into automating some of my development tasks in Cocoa/Xcode environment.  For the longest time I was using Subversion which would integrate quite well with Xcode. Recently, however, I have been exploring other version control systems.  Especially git.  Since it’s a much newer (D)VCS it does not have as much integration into systems as subversion.

I have managed to find some interesting solutions to include Git version number in Xcode project however the only actual solutions I have found are written in languages I don’t care for anymore.  Yes I can program in them but why would I want to.

So here is a quick solution written in MacRuby.

#!/usr/local/bin/macruby

git_output = `git show --abbrev-commit`
commit_version = git_output.split("\n").grep(/^commit/).first
version = commit_version.gsub(/^commit\s+(.*)\.{3}/, "\\1")
if version
  list = NSMutableDictionary.dictionaryWithContentsOfFile("Info.plist")
  list["CFBundleVersion"] = version
  list.writeToFile(’Info.plist’, :atomically => true)
end

In my final solution I intend to have an output in following format:

major.minor.revision (build)

where the “build” is going to correspond with the git commit version
and the other parts will reflect the marketing version numbers.

Sometimes a little bit of automation goes a long way and other times it may be just wasted time. I have run into one of these situations recently when dealing with Xcode and trying to rename menu items from NewApplication to the Application Name.

For Example:

Quit NewApplication -> Quit TestApp

My first approach was to use Ruby open the MainMenu.xib and do a replacement. This technique may prove to be useful in the future when I have more command line tools for other tasks, but currently there is a much simpler way of dealing with renaming menu items.

1. Right click on MainMenu.nib and select “Open As” -> “Source Code File”

2. Press: “Command-F” to open find/replace dialog

3. Replace all NewApplication strings with desired application name.

That’s it

I have spend some time wondering why would Apple decide to style their buttons in a non-standard way and then not respect the css style set by the designer. I just found the answer how to get rid of the Apple predefined style and allow the buttons to look like in every other browser. To do this you have to set the webkit-appearance property to none:


input { --webkit-appearance: none; }


That’s all.

It seems that Google (the search engine) has hard time associating XcodePhoenix with CocoaHeads Arizona or Cocoaheads and Phoenix and people are finding my site when searching for the group. My previous post did not mention the Google forum XcodePhoenix uses for communication so here it is:

http://groups.google.com/group/xcodephoenix

Hope to see you there.

Sometimes it is very cool to work for a small company. It comes with perks you just can’t get in a big corporation. For example, a new computer. Yes my old Dell workstation is still working well; however it is not optimized for a *nix geek. So I my boss let me get a workstation that will better fit my work habits. I got a brand new Mac Pro! I don’t think I could ever get that in a big corporation unless I was working for Apple.