Someone on here recently recommended BWToolkit, and it really impressed me, so I started googling for more IB plug-ins. I've found a couple on random blogs, but haven't been able to find any kind of repository/aggregator for them. Anyone know where I can find more of these?
Thanks.
I just created a page on CocoaDev to list them [edit: question originally just said “Interface Builder plug-ins”, did not mention Cocoa frameworks], with the two I know of listed.
Well that's a good start. I guess that wiki page is the de-facto repository, for now. Seems like there's not much out there.
You are not looking for Interface Builder plug-ins. You think you are, but you aren't. BWToolkit, the example you use in your question, is not an Inteface Builder plug-in. Brandon bills it as an Interface Builder plug-in but it is actually a framework and a plug-in. The framework contains the actual controls. The plug-in contains the integration with Interface Builder.
So really, what you are looking for are frameworks that contain or provide Interface Builder plug-ins. I have changed your question to reflect that, so it is more likely to be found by people using Google to search for similar things in the future.
I know what I am looking for. Not all frameworks contain IB plugins. I am looking for a specific subset of frameworks, those which contain IB plugins. An IB-plugin without a framework is useless, therefore the framework part is assumed. I am NOT looking for regular old frameworks, so stop trying to change my question to that. Your additions only seem to be confusing people.
I have reported your post, hopefully moderators will be able to stop your obnoxious behavior.
"Without a framework, what would you have to plug in to IB?"
Your words, not mine. Anyways, I'm done arguing this with you. Just remember that I can roll back for every time that you edit.
It's clear you have a lot of experience in this field, but instead of offering answers you decided to nitpick where there are no nits to pick.
Additionally, you have not "changed the question to refelct that," you have changed the question to a completely different question. I would have though that after four rollbacks you would relaize that you're doing more harm than good. Just stop, okay?
Of course, Chris Hanson is absolutely correct when he says that an Interface Builder plugin is useless without an accompanying framework. Interface Builder merely provides a graphical way to manage objects in a framework; without the framework itself, Interface Builder has nothing to manage.
However, I do think that there is a completely valid sort of Interface Builder plugin that wouldn't necessitate the installation of an accompanying framework, and that would be one that provides Interface Builder integration features for objects in Cocoa/Cocoa Touch which would otherwise appear as just generic objects.
For those of you who come to this page Google, please recognise the difference between Interface Builder plugins and frameworks: even the examples mentioned above work on frameworks (they could be Foundation, AppKit, UIKIt, etc.)
Related
Assume you have to develop an app, which needs a completely customized user interface so that you can not use any standard UI objects in Xcode.
How would you proceed to create such an user interface? Would you use the interface builder? Would you create something like a master parent UIView? What are the best practices to achieve this?
What would be the most elegant solution with less code duplication?
If by "complete customization" you mean the look and feel of the app,
then I suggest to design the IB objects you require using some design IDE's such as photoshop and then use those slices for your project.
This is the best option I find so far to get a complete customized look with minimal code, and by minimal, I mean you don't actually require any coding. You can do this complete customization within your Interface builder.
However, I don't think you can completely ignore standard UI objects as you require them to add basic functionality.
If customized controls are what you are looking for, then I suggest you to create separate custom control classes so that they can be reused anywhere in your project, or in other projects too.
Here are two wonderful tutorials on custom controls:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/36288/how-to-make-a-custom-control
http://www.raywenderlich.com/56885/custom-control-for-ios-tutorial-a-reusable-knob
Hope this helps!
Firefox 4 comes soon (ok, next year ;)) and there is a Firefox plugin to sync your bookmarks etc. with Firefox 3.whatever .
I would like to know if anyone has a comprehensive, up-to-date tutorial to integrate Firefox Sync into your own plugin? Or any idea regarding this?
I mainly followed this official "tutorial" and also this blog post, but the information seems to be slightly outdated.
For example, the object is not called Weave anymore but Engines and the weave.engines. preference became services.sync.engines.. I played a little with all the mentioned options, but it does not seems to work (and my plugin does not show up in list where you can select what to sync).
I assume that the Tracker and Store classes are fine, the main problem is to register the engine...
The ClientAPI tutorial you mention is definitely the way to go. I updated it recently so if something's not working, please let us know so I can fix it in the docs. Wladimir's blogpost is definitely quite old and contains some outdated information. We will also make changes to some parts of the API in the upcoming beta releases, so be prepared for some flux...
The Weave namespace is still the canonical way to access Sync related APIs from UI code. It exposes components such as Weave.Service and Weave.Engines. You can import it via Components.utils.import("resource://services-sync/main.js"). If you want to implement your own engine, you'll have to import the actual underlying modules, though (all listed in the ClientAPI tutorial). The tutorial also describes how to register your custom engine implementation. Once it's registered, it won't automatically show up in the preferences UI, though. I suggest building your own UI that flips the services.sync.engine.YOURENGINE pref in your add-on's preferences.
Out of curiosity, what kind of data are you trying to sync?
I know some of the tutorials for creating Xcode project templates, for example this one here: http://robnapier.net/blog/project-templates-364
This is the best one I could find. All others basically repeat the same info, or are no longer up to date, or worse tell me that even they don't know what they're doing. Possibly useful tools that are linked to here and in other places are no longer available.
I keep running into roadblocks, and would like to gather as much information as possible on the process of creating Xcode project templates. Info that is most importantly up to date (at least it must be relevant for Xcode 3 or higher).
For example, what I'd like to see is:
a description of the
TemplateChooser.plist and similar
plist files and what these options do
(in my case, once I add a
TemplateChooser.plist, my project
disappears from the Xcode project
template list)
how to create a project template that references another .xcodeproj (when I do that, the other .xcodeproj appears in the project template list even though it doesn't use the special naming convention)
processes that can be applied, for example is it possible to run a script during the creating of a project from a template? This would be useful to unzip certain files into the newly created project.
If you have the answer or suggestions to any of the issues above, I'd appreciate that. Otherwise any link to good Xcode project template resources would be highly recommended. Especially if there is an official documentation from Apple - I haven't found one yet which seems to imply that project templates are undocumented.
Have you seen these:
http://www.sodeso.nl/?p=895
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/iPhone/CreatingXcodeProject.aspx
If you say you have searched, I'm pretty sure you've already seen the links but these are the best resources I could find with my 'googlabilities'
You might try contact this guy - http://linkedin.com/in/mottishneor he has some related messages around the web
The links suggested by FX are also not bad at all!
There is indeed little XCode template info out there. What I have found of interest are the following links (I documented myself on the topic, but haven't yet gone any further):
a Google Code search reveals a few examples, but not much
in particular, I found interesting to look at the code provided by Three20; they have some basic examples, like here
referencing another project worked for me, so maybe you could open a specific question about that giving more details?
there is information scattered on the Apple mailing-lists
there is no official documentation from Apple, as is evidenced by the lack of results to this query
I'm sorry if this is not a Enlighting, concise answer. As you said, it's not well documented, and sources are all over the place. I just hope I could highlight some places to find information that your own searches might not have reached :)
I don't have a Mac anymore, so this is as much as I can give you without testing this myself. As far as I can tell, Xcode templates are undocumented by Apple.
This guy has some guides for messing with Xcode templates but the info is pretty sparse. My suggestion for working with templateChooser.plist is to try to only edit that file in the interface builder.
This guide is a good example of how to add a reference to another .xcodeproj. For the reason you were having trouble adding a reference to your project we probably need more information.
If you scroll way down in this doc you can that each template already includes a script called myscript.sh. This script will show up in the scripts menu for projects built with that template. That isn't quite as convenient as running scripts automatically, but it's better than nothing.
In conclusion, Xcode template documentation is a nightmare. It looks like there are a lot of powerful features there, but they are obscured because of lack of user friendlyness and because documentation lags far behind Apples updates of Xcode. It just doesn't seem to be a priority for them. I hope this helps.
And yet another video link http://howtomakeiphoneapps.com/2010/10/how-to-make-custom-xcode-templates-with-video/
I am primarily a fluent .NET developer (as can be seen from the amount of posts and threads I make about .NET), but I thought it would be good to learn RoR.
In doing so, I have a few questions about the architecture of the language (Ruby) and the framework (RoR):
1) In .NET, every object is derived from System but inherits System.Object. So when I type System., I get a list of namespaces and then in those namespaces, classes and more namespaces.
Does Ruby not have this sort of hierarchy?
2) In some cases, I don't get the intellisense. For example, I wrote the class as outlined here (http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToSendEmailsWithActionMailer) but in the line recipients user.email, nothing comes up when I type "user.".
Any idea why?
Thank
Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmers) has an excellent screencast series on the Ruby object model/metaprogramming. We watched this in a local Ruby user's group. The series isn't free, but it's not expensive either. You might want to check out the free preview to see if you think it is worth your time.
And to give you an answer. Yes, everything in Ruby derives from Object. You can find the docs on this at http://corelib.rubyonrails.org/. Look for the Object class.
I'm not sure why you aren't getting intellisense, partly because you haven't specified your IDE. It's possible that you can't because you've added the method dynamically and no intellisense is available.
If we compare .NET to Rails then yes, there is this kind of hierarchy there. And in general, you can achieve this kind of hierarchy in any Ruby application via using modules.
I guess it's because of Ruby's dynamic nature.
Ruby is a pure OO language meaning that everything from classes to objects derive from the Object class.
Download NetBeans. There is full intellisense support for Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
http://www.netbeans.org/features/ruby/index.html
Intellisense support probably won't get you what you think it will get you. Because Ruby is a dynamic language, Intellisense, or code completion, is difficult. What you will find is that either the drop down is so flooded with possible completions as to be useless. Or in your case nothing at all.
It's not 100% useless, but I have never found it terribly valuable.
Does anybody use the Class Designer much in Visual Studio?
I have downloaded the Modeling Power Toys for 2005 and have been impressed with what I've seen so far. The MSDN Class Designer Blog doesn't seem to have been updated for a while but it still looks quite useful.
Is the Class Designer a quick way to build the basic application or should I just work out on paper and then start coding?
Thanks
As a visualization tool, or for exploratory purposes (drawing up multiple options to see what they look like) it's not bad, but generally I find the object browser does fine for most stuff I care about.
As a code generation tool, it's a terrible idea.
The whole idea that we will design all our code structure first, then fill in the blanks with small bits of implementation is fundamentally broken.
The only time you actually know what the code structure should look like, is if you've done the exact same thing before - however then you can just use your previous code, and you don't need to draw up any new code in any kind of designer.
If you decide ahead of time to use a particular class structure before you've actually tried to solve the problem, there is a 100% chance that you will pick the wrong design, and shoot yourself in the foot.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: No, not at all. There's a reason it hasn't been updated.
[EDIT] # MrBrutal - Sorry - do you mean to generate code or just represent a design? Because I took your question as to generate code for you.
I guess this is old, but I use it a lot. It could definitely be improved, but I find it extremely useful to be able to visualize my class structure, and to be able to jump to a specific class or method by clicking on it visually.
It's also slightly easier to add classes/interfaces with than the solution explorer, although the new files always end up in the root folder, instead of the same folder as the CD.
The main benefit I find is to be able to see a group of closely related classes at once. I think the best approach might be to have a single CD for each code folder/namespace.
I've used it a couple of times to get some decent looking class diagrams to put in presentations/blogposts etc. But thats about it...
Any suggestions on other simple UML/class diagram tools that is easy to use and create some nice looking diagrams? Must be able to generate diagrams from .NET code.
I have tried it out couple of times, mainly for viewing existing classes.
If it would show all the relationships, it would be more usefull. Now it only shows inheritation.
I find it useful sometimes, more often for documentation afterwards.
It's a new little utility, but I don't think you get the full functionality in VS Pro - I think you need Architect's Edition.
The comments here suggest that few people find the class designer useful.
Amusing to note that Microsoft designed the class designer to be a useful replacement to useless UML (UML diagrams being untrustworthy once they lose synchronisation with source code).
The trouble with class diagrams is that they tell us what we already know.
I only use the class designer to display my existing classes, but I don't use it the other way, e.g., design your classes there then let it generate the code.