Hello I need to load NSKeyedArchiver classes to C++/CLI counterparts. Is there any way to get internal format of NSKeyedArchiver?
Another option is to rewrite whole saving and opening code into pure C++ for both Mac and Windows.
Thanks a lot.
So your constraints seem to be:
Something easy to parse on both Windows and Mac.
3D modeling data, so the format needs to be efficient
If you want something quick and dirty, go with a binary plist (and possibly gzip it). You could also try Google's protocol buffers but I have no experience with that. There are also a couple open source implementations of Foundation out there -- Cocotron might be most useful for you.
If you're not serializing anything Objective-C specific then just use XML property lists.
Related
I am having trouble locating an example for creating a windows named pipe in matlab.
Any suggestions on how to program or where to look?
Using .NET's System.IO.Pipes is probably the easiest way out of the box, easier than writing a MEX file to call the Win32 API. Matlab lets you call .NET directly from M-code, and the objects are managed so resource cleanup will be easier. .NET 3.5 and newer support named pipes.
The resulting M-code would look something like this. (Sorry; I don't have Matlab at the moment so can't test it.)
NET.addAssembly('System.Core'); %# might be superfluous
pipeStream = System.IO.Pipes.NamedPipeServerStream('testpipe', System.IO.Pipes.PipeDirection.Out);
Nowadays, I think .NET is the easiest way to access native Windows features that Matlab doesn't directly expose. So for something like this, the first thing to try is looking for examples of doing it in C#. If it can be done in C# using .NET standard library features, you can often translate it pretty directly to M-code. E.g. I found this one by Googling for "create named pipe .net" and getting this example. Loren discusses this technique here.
Would be usefull to see how things work but not sure on the legality of it
Most Mac apps are written using Cocoa in Objective-C; which, while it is a compiled language, means that there is a fair bit of information left over that could be used by a decompiler.
I'm not sure if there are a lot of decompilers out there that leverages this information, at least I haven't heard of any.
However, there are also another option; F-Script.
F-Script can be used to attach to an executable and explore its interfaces, while not as good as source, it can give you a pretty clear idea of how the executable is built, and how it operates.
As for the legality issue:
IANAL, but as far as I know, reverse-engineering for the purposes of compatibility is legal in many jurisdictions, and I can't imagine that decompiling an executable to look at its code is illegal, unless the specific EULA specifically prohibits it.
Edit: WRT Steam specifically, it is probably NOT written in Cocoa, but C# with some manner of .NET compatibility layer; and it's probably not a good place to start if you want to learn how to make applications for Mac OS X.
By far, the best Mac OS X disassembler I've used is Hopper available here:
http://www.hopperapp.com/
It will also convert the assembly to C pseudo code as best it can. It will generate code flow diagrams with blue lines (true blue, love it) for true and red for false paths.
It's The Mac OS reverse engineering tool. There are even Youtube videos that will show you how to use it.
If it's an open-source app, yes. Otherwise it's possible through decompilation but the output will be a real pain in the ass to look at. If you just want the protocols and the interfaces of categories and classes, have a look at class-dump.
I'm not aware of a nib decompiler.
Whether decompilation is legal: ask a lawyer. This may (and probably does) differ per jurisdiction.
Is it possible to view the source of a mac app?
Realistically, no. Sure, you might be a able to use a decompiler to get a peek, but the kind of output you'll get won't be easy to read. If you're asking this question, this route probably isn't going to be helpful to you.
Specifically interested in GUI and how the steam app for mac works
It's a good bet that it works about the same way that most other applications work. It might use custom controls to look different from a typical application that mostly uses the standard Cocoa controls. But underneath, just about any GUI application written for MacOS X will use the run loops, responder chain, and view hierarchy that Cocoa provide. The main exceptions would be applications that are built mostly using an alternate framework like OpenGL or WebKit.
Figure out what, specifically, the Steam application does that you'd like to do. Take a look at the tools that Cocoa provides to see if you can figure it out yourself; if not, ask about it here.
I have a library for Haskell that can take an ordinary web application, run it on a local server, and then open up a window displaying that application using QtWebkit. The code to interface with Qt is very short. However, I would like to avoid the Qt overhead for Windows users.
It seems like the best approach would be to have an alternative to this QtWebkit-based C++ file that instead uses the MSHTML library on Windows. Unfortunately, I have almost no experience with Windows-specific libraries. It seems like I need to use the IWebBrowser2 interface, but that seems mostly speculative.
If someone can point me in the right direction on this, I would be much obliged. The final trick here is that it has to compile with MinGW. Not sure how much of a complication that is in this case.
Thanks
You can use hdirect to call the IWebBrowser2 interface from Haskell. It's messy to code against OLE/COM but it can do the job. Making a C binding to the interface is possible but if you need MinGW then it may actually be harder than a purely Haskell approach.
I have couple of application written in PyQt4 where I've used standard Python gettext library for internationalization and localization of GUI. It works good for me. But I've selected gettext just because I've already had knowledge and experience of gettext usage, and zero of experience with Qt4 tr() approach.
Now I'd like to better compare both approaches and understand what I'm missing by using gettext instead of QObject.tr, and does there any serious reason why I should not use gettext for Qt4/PyQt4 applications?
In my understanding advantages of using gettext are:
GNU gettext is mature and it seems to be standard de-facto in GNU/Linux world.
There is enough special editors for PO files to simplify translators work, although textual nature of PO templates makes it not strictly necessary.
There is even web services available which can be used for collaborative translations.
gettext is standard Python library, so I don't need to install anything special to use it in runtime.
It has very good support for singular/plural forms selection via ngettext().
What I see as advantages of QObject.tr():
This is native technology for Qt4/PyQt4 so maybe it will work better/faster (although I have no data to prove).
The messages to translate may have additional context information which will help translators to choose the best variants for homonym words, e.g. the english word "Letter" can be translates as "Character", "Mail" or even kind of "Paper size" depending on the actual context.
What I see as disadvantages of QObject.tr() vs gettext:
I did not found in the Qt documentation how's supported singular/plural selection there.
Qt4 TS translation template is in XML format and therefore more complex to edit without special editor (QT Linguist) and it seems there is no other third-party solutions or web services. So it would require for translators to learn new tool (if they are already familiar with PO tools).
But all the items above are not critical enough to clearly say that any tool is better of other. And I don't want to start flame war about what is better because it's very subjective. I just want to know what I missing as pros and cons of QObject.tr() vs gettext.
One simple reason to use QObject.tr() is:
It saves you the need to install gettext on Windows, making cross-platform work a bit easier.
I try to have as little binary dependencies as possible on Windows.
All have their pros and cons, but to define them more clearly you would have to define first if you're targeting a mobile environment or a desktop environment.
Within our company we use different methods simply because the ideal solution does not exist yet.
For desktop development we're using PO files simply because the buttons are not scaled and therefore text will fit.
For mobile development, the translation of a string depends on the button size which could be different on landscape and portrait devices.
So this complicates it a little because a PO file can just have 1 translation of a certain word.
So we selected XLIFF for this, so we could assign unique ID's to a string.
This is not an easy task as well, because there are no good solutions to convert .RC files to XLIFF files.
(Because current tools convert ALL strings between "" which is of course unwanted behavior).
So I wrote a converter for this task.
However, when thinking of localization, then plural forms are very important so not having this is not a good localization solution.
Therefore, I would say to go for PO gettext.
Greetings,
Floris.
At the current time, Qt does not handle plural forms when you're making use of QT_TRANSLATE_NOOP
You could add that args are managed differently...
With Gettext, we can do
_("Hello %(name)s from %(city)s") % {person.__dict__}
whereas in PyQt, we do
self.tr("Hello %1 from %2").arg(person.name).arg(person.city)
I would like to create a file format for my app like Quake, OO, and MS Office 07 have.
Basically a uncompressed zip folder, or tar file.
I need this to be cross platform (mac and windows).
Can I do something via command prompt and bash?
If you want a single file that is portable to all platforms and which contain structured data, consider using sqlite. You'll get a full featured ACID compliant database that exists on disk as a single file.
There are libraries you can link against to directly access the file, and there is a command line tool you can use as well. No matter what language you are using, most likely there is support for it.
http://www.sqlite.org
Have a look at the open source 7Zip compression format. For your specific needs, you can use it in an "Archive" mode, zero compression but very fast.
It provides a powerful SDK, LZMA, from the site:
"LZMA is the default and general compression method of 7z format in the 7-Zip program. LZMA provides a high compression ratio and very fast decompression, so it is very suitable for embedded applications. For example, it can be used for ROM (firmware) compressing.
The LZMA SDK provides the documentation, samples, header files, libraries, and tools you need to develop applications that use LZMA compression."
Zip is supported everywhere. If a container is all you need, than those are surely good options.
SQLite is great.
A single file, crossplatform, a tiny library, SQL access to data, transactions, the whole enchilada.
you can use transactions to guarantee consistent return points in case of crashing. check uses for sqlite, they specifically advocate using it as a data model layer for desktop applications.
also, there's a command-line tool to manually access the data.
First thing you should ask yourself is, "Do I really need to make my own?"
Depending on what you want to use it for, you are probably better off using a common format and some pre-made libraries which already handle one of those formats very well.
Good places to start:
http://www.destructor.de/libtar/index.htm (tar -- a the 'container' format)
http://www.zlib.net/ (zlib -- a method of compressing data before or after you put it in the container)
If you still really think you need to make your own, I would suggest studying something very simple first, like tar's format:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(file_format)
or
http://schmidt.devlib.org/file-formats/tar-archive-file-format.html
Instead of making a format, I'd just decide on a convention. One or more named files within the container have the metadata you need to access the rest of the files, and know what to do with them. The container itself, though, should just be some ubiquitous format, such as zip. No need to reinvent the wheel, here.