“Last weekend, I decided to expand Coverflow to work with my entire photo album,” said Erica Sadun in her recent post, Accessing all your onboard photos from your iPhone database. “This involved exploring the MusicLibrary and PhotoLibrary frameworks to find out how I could extract a complete set of albums and their pictures. The PLPhotoLibrary class proved to hold the key. With it, I could request an album list, and then build up a dictionary of photos that linked back from the image identifier to the album it came from.”

She then goes on to post the code on how to accomplish this. Quite nice.

Todd Ogasawara has continued to publish his Mac FFOSS (Freeware/Free and Open Source Software) column on O’Reilly’s Mac Center. If you’ve fallen behind on what’s new (and cheap) in the Mac universe, you might want to hop over there for a peek.

Erica Sadun has posted a raft of excellent iPhone technical shorts on O’Reilly’s Digital Media Mac Blog. Topics include Programmatically Handling iPhone interruptions, Creating an UIImage from a URL, and plenty more.

If you’re an “under the glass” iPhone type, you should definitely check out what Erica has been writing about lately.

I’ve previously written about how I use Radioshift as part of my home automation setup. However, in the last week or so I’ve been using it as a desktop application, as it’s intended, instead.

And frankly, it’s driving me crazy. I’m continually running into two problems:

First, the show streams from KGO-AM are seriously messed up. Without exception, about half-way through the recording, the first 10 minutes of the show repeats. Sometimes this happens more than once. After the repeated segment, the show picks up where it was before the flashback. It’s frustrating, and I’ve reported the problem to Radiotime (the provider of the streams), but it is exacerbated by Radioshift’s interface.

Which is the second problem. Although Radioshift is sometimes described at “TiVo for radio,” it really doesn’t offer many playback controls at all. There’s no “resume playback” feature, so if you stop listening to a show, you can’t get back to where you left off. Not only does Radioshift not remember your stopping point, it does not offer any controls for navigating the recording. No rewind. No fast-foward.

But there’s an easy workaround that you can use until Rogue Amobea addresses this oversight. Specify QuickTime Player as your “audio editor” in Radioshift’s preferences. Then, when you want to listen to a show, click “Edit Audio” to automatically open the recording in QuickTime Player.

This works exceptionally well because QuickTime Player, even without buying QuickTime Pro, provides almost all the playback controls that Radioshift lacks. My favorite is that the fast-forward button, if held down while the audio is playing, allows you to skim ahead and easily skip over commercials.

If you do have QuickTime Pro, you can use the AV Controls to speed up the playback of talk shows. Simply open the AV Controls window, then adjust the Playback Speed setting. I use about 1.5X faster. Then, adjust the Pitch Shift slider until the voices sound normal again. It’s really quite amazing and a great time saver.

Finally, don’t forget that you can also skip to points in the recording by dragging the playhead. If you want to temporarily mark a point in the recording for later review, use the “I” and “O” keys during playback to set selection markers in the QT window (QT Pro required).

I hope these tips help you get more out of Radioshift. If you have one of your own to share, please leave a comment.

A former Apple engineer told me the iTunes team is adding features faster than they can be documented. Here’s one I’ll be using a lot: a way to re-download deleted podcasts.

Occasionally, podcast episodes don’t download completely. This happens to me a lot with This American Life, and it recently happened with my own podcast, Digital Media Insider (home page | iTunes link). So I figured I’d delete the partial download and try again. But I couldn’t get it back. iTunes didn’t show the deleted episode when I clicked “Update Podcast”:

Unlucky 13: After deleting the partially downloaded episode 13, I couldn’t get it back. Right-clicking and selecting “Update Podcast” wouldn’t display the missing episode.

The secret, I learned at KD Murray’s site, is to collapse the episode list by clicking on the disclosure triangle next to the podcast’s name and then to Option-click the triangle again. That expands the episode list and shows the missing episodes in gray with a “Get” button next to them:

Option-clicking the disclosure triangle next to the podcast’s name reveals the missing episodes.

Now, normally you wouldn’t want to re-download episodes you’d deleted, so I can sort of understand why this feature is hidden, but by using it on some other shows to which I subscribe, I discovered episodes I didn’t realize I’d missed. And the partial-download problem is probably fairly common, so it might be nice to have a “repair podcast” menu option. Or better, since the duration of the podcast should be recorded in the XML file, make iTunes smart enough to re-download truncated episodes itself.

What “hidden” iTunes features have you found?

When I want to concentrate on a computing task, I often invoke the Finder’s “hide others” command by Command-Option-clicking on an icon in the Dock. But my screen is so big and my desktop so cluttered that merely hiding the other applications is hardly restful.

In less time that it would take to clean up the piles of icons on my desktop, I whipped up this AppleScript and mapped it to a function key. It grabs the path of the frontmost application, launches Katsura Shareware’s free Screenshot Helper — hiding everything on the desktop — and then switches back to the original app.

(* 
db Hide-the-Desktop
By David Battino, Batmosphere.com, 2007-09-30 
This script hides the desktop and then switches back to the previous app.
Requires Screenshot Helper, free at www.katsurashareware.com.
*)
set front_app to (path to frontmost application as Unicode text)
tell application "Screenshot Helper"
	activate
end tell
tell application front_app
	activate
end tell

Hopefully your virtual desktop is tidier than mine, but you may still find the “do something and then switch back” routine helpful.

Katsura Screenshot Helper covers your messy desktop with a pure color or photo.

So far, I’m pretty much enamored of Rogue Amoeba’s new Radioshift application. If you haven’t tried it yet, it allows you to easily listen to, and record, radio shows from around the world. It makes automatically recording new episodes of a show, or “subscribing,” as simple as TiVo does for television programs.

I think Radioshift would be a wonderful addition to my home, and I want to run it on the Mac that I already use for home automation. However, Radioshift isn’t really optimized for use in a “server” situation. That’s understandable, but it hasn’t stopped me from tying to bend it to my will anyway. Here’s are notes on my progress so far:

• I love that Radioshift uses a background process for recording shows that you’ve subscribed to. This means that you don’t have to leave the app running all of the time. You can use the sound files directly, without opening Radioshift, too. You’ll find your recorded shows in the ~/Music/Radioshift/ folder.

• I want to listen to my recorded shows using another computer, because the home automation Mac is tucked away in a corner and I rarely use it directly. Radioshift doesn’t have any built-in support for sharing, but I can load the above-mentioned files into QuickTime Player (or similar) after mounting the server’s drive. The bonus prize for doing this is that QuickTime Player allows you to fast forward during playback, to skip commercials, which is a feature that Radioshift currently lacks.

• If you don’t care about skipping commercials, just use the Finder’s built-in ability to play QuickTime files, as shown below. Very handy!

• Radioshift does, apparently, have the ability to add recordings to your iTunes Library. This means you could use iTunes sharing to listen to the shows on other computers. However, this doesn’t work for me. First, I haven’t been able to get Radioshift to successfully add a recording to iTunes. But even if it did, it’s a manual process (Radioshift doesn’t do it automatically) and I don’t want to keep iTunes running on my home automation Mac.

Although parts of this feel a little awkward, so far I’ve found it worth doing. I hope that as Radioshift continues to evolve the process will get easier. If you have tips to share, please feel free to chime in.

I just posted a quick how-to over at TUAW regarding installing the latest binary iPhone developer toolchain. You can download a copy and use the package to get started with iPhone programming.

The hardest part of the entire exercise involves copying your iPhone file system to your Mac.

Here’s a nifty little trick. Install my iPhone utilities package. Then cd into /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app. Then issue the following command: restart; ./SpringBoard. This lets you run SpringBoard from the command line and peek at all its NSLog messages as they are issued.

Be aware that this is not safe, your stuff won’t work right, and you’ll surely have to reboot after. But it’s still kind of fun in a power-tool way.

A couple of days ago, as I was updating SendSong (latest version here), I discovered a really nice trick. Until now, I’d been storing ringtones in /Library/Ringtones, the same folder used by the built-in ringtones. Then “DarkTen”“Ste” tipped me off to the fact that you could store them in the root folder, in /var/root/Library/Ringtones and they’d still be recognized. (”LG” discovered this and Nate True confirmed it, adding that there’s a third way to put Ringtones into your iTunes folder–but it’s complicated.) SendSong now takes advantage of this and limits your access (both adding and removing ringtones) to that folder.

What this means, though, is that if you can track down a copy of iPhone Interface for either Windows or Mac, you can install ringtones without having to jailbreak your phone. Create the /var/root/Library/Ringtones folder (on a non-jailbroken phone, that’s the Library that appears as your home folder) and stick whatever ringtones you want into that folder. There’s no need to access system files. You can do it all from the public directories.

Photographer James Duncan Davidson did a neat experiment with a recent blog, transforming a series of images into a tutorial movie that shows the evolution of a photograph step by step. This format lets the viewer compare images more easily because they’re superimposed.

Readers liked it a lot, but wished for more informative captions. (Duncan had pasted the captions right onto the images as bitmap text, so there wasn’t much room.) I also thought it would also be nice to step through the slides without groping around with the QuickTime transport slider.

My first idea was to replace the movie with JavaScript-controlled arrays of individual photos and text. But creating that would be too much hassle for blog authors. It’s also nice to have a self-contained slideshow file.

Then I wondered about using a QuickTime text track instead. It turned out to be surprisingly easy.

1. First I created a five-picture slideshow in QuickTime Pro with the Open Image Sequence command.
2. Then I typed out five captions in a text editor, with a return between each line, and saved the file as plain text.
3. Finally, I opened the text file with QuickTime Pro (making it into a text-only movie), copied the text movie, and added it to the slideshow with the Add Scaled command. Opening the QuickTime Properties window, I then offset the caption downward.

Here’s the result:

But what about the interactivity? I considered investigating sprite tracks, chapter tracks, Flash, or more complex approaches, but then I noticed that the little left/right arrows at the right side of the QuickTime controller bar stepped between images. Interactivity is built in!

I did do a bit of behind-the-scenes prep on the slideshow above: I layered a black GIF in the background to create a frame around the movie. I also set the slide transition time to two seconds, because that’s the default duration of the captions QuickTime generates. But if you want to get fancy, you can format the fonts and colors as well.

Last week, I got a call from a friend in dire straits: his MacBook would no longer boot and he hadn’t yet made a backup of an important documentary project he was working on as a freelance photographer. When I had a first look at the MacBook, it did start booting, the “progress rotor” did show up, but instead of presenting the OS X welcome screen, an icon appeared after a too-long wait, indicating the disk could not be found. Ouch.

So I inserted the OS X installation disk, re-started the machine courtesy of the Power button, and held down the Option key to be able to select the DVD as the boot volume. Interestingly, the Mac’s internal drive was among the boot volume options, but when launching the Disk Utility application from the OS X installation disk, the software could not find the internal HD. As the next step in the quest to revive this Mac, I booted it from a TechTool Pro 4 DVD and launched TechTool Pro, but, alas, the internal drive again failed to appear.

Website RIActant has kindly posted an iPhone tech talk debriefing for anyone who was not able to attend in person. In addition to an organized summary of the talk, they’re making their raw notes available as a PDF download.

Behold iLight, my latest creation. It turns your $500 or $600 iPhone into a flashlight.

Use. Enjoy.

Pummeled by palettes, I’ve been thinking of connecting the extra DVI output* on my G5 tower to a second monitor. That daydream got a boost when my terrific eye doctor raved about his multi-monitor home setup recently.

Multiple monitor photo collage by c2k2e.

So…what advice do you have for setting up and using multiple monitors? Do you like them side by side? Over/under? Same size/brand? How do you arrange programs, windows, palettes, and the Dock?

One of my fellow Cocoa Bootcamp friends, Jonathan Saggau has put his Cocoa skills to get use and wrote an “Unsanctioned”
Pong Application for the iPhone.

Here are two pics from his blog:

iPhone Menu

Pong in Action

Great job at being subversive Jonathan!

If you’re curious about Leopard, and haven’t had a chance to pop over to see Apple’s OS Foundations overview, I recommend you try to find a few minutes to browse through it. It’s part 6 of Apple’s Leopard Tech developer series and it’s freely available to all comers–you don’t have to be a developer to access it.

Although there’s already a “hello world’ floating out there for the iPhone, it involves a number of complicated classes. I decided to simplify and create a new “Hello World” from scratch based only on UIWindow, UIView and UITextView.

The code follows after the jump.

1. You probably want to wait for the binary UI toolchain if you can. Getting it built and configured is a nightmare.

2. /private/var/logs/CrashReporter is, as you expect, your friend

3. You don’t have to edit DisplayOrder.plist. SpringBoard will add any applications it finds to the Widget display. Only use DisplayOrder.plist to change the order or to hide items from the /Applications folder.

Here’s a quick how-to for people wondering how they can install the iPhone toolchain and try out their own command-line programs.

1. Jailbreak your iPhone and install ssh. You need full access to your iPhone’s file system.
2. Download a copy of the binary toolchain and unpack it onto your i386 Macintosh.
3. Copy arm-cc-specs to your home folder as .arm-cc-specs
4. Move the entire build (local-toolchain) into /usr/local/. (I don’t recommend breaking it out any further so you keep the entire install together.)
5. Edit .arm-cc-specs to match the location of your toolchain, e.g. /usr/local/local-toolchain/share/
6. Edit your path to include /usr/local/local.toolchain/bin and start a new window so the path matches up.
7. Create a new, standard helloworld.c
8. Attempt to compile it using arm-apple-darwin-cc, which will now be in your path. This will fail.

And now we come to the hard part. You either have to edit your system headers, which Apple made read-only for a reason, or load pre-updated headers, which you’ll have to google for. Editing headers basically goes like this: Whenever your compile fails, add || defined(__arm__) to any line that includes if or elif defined (__i386__). Repeat as needed until your hello world compiles. Then, copy your executable to your iPhone and test it there.

Recently, my iPod has been collecting duplicate playlists like a child collects dirt. It’s not an unknown problem. A bit of googling shows that others have had the same issue and as there didn’t appear to be a simple solution, I decided to write a little script to take care of things. The following code deletes zombie playlists from the iPod. After, I re-sync to restore the playlists. This takes only a second because the iPod has already been synchronized before I run the script. Figlet, as you probably might guess, is the name of my iPod.

tell application "iTunes"
	set Figlet to first source whose name is "Figlet"
	set pls to every user playlist of Figlet
	repeat with eachpl in pls
		try
			delete eachpl
		end try
	end repeat
end tell

I spent a few hours this weekend upgrading a Core Solo Mac Mini to a Core 2 Duo. Here are a few thoughts on the experiences and lessons learned.

QuickTime 7.2 adds new export presets for the iPhone and an improved H.264 codec. Publishing movies on the Web and mobile devices has never been more beautiful. David Battino just published QuickTime Web Movie Secrets on O’Reilly’s Digital Media site. He’s included some great playback and embedding techniques. Definitely worth a read.

If you want to learn more about QuickTime Pro 7.2 and its capabilities, you might want to download the User Guide from Apple.

So does the iPhone contains Mobile Web Server, aka Raccoon? Instead of “websites”, Raccoon asks us to think using “mobsites”, mobile websites. This comes as a port of Apache web server to mobile phone platforms. From what I’ve been able to google, Raccoon enables mobile phone users to become content providers (using their keyboards, microphones and onboard cameras). I am just starting to learn about this so thanks in advance to anyone who can point me to more information about iPhone-generated content, Raccoon, and gateways. Am I right in thinking this goes beyond just normal virtual private networks?

Update: Here’s a post from Radar last year by Nikolaj Nyholm on Raccoon.

Update 2: Reader Rodolphe suggests that the racoon on the iphone is not the Nokia variant but rather part of the IPSec tools and used for connecting the iPhone to VPNs. Man page

Update 3: The “cc” versus “c” should have given it away. The cool Mobile Web Server has two c’s. The VPN stuff only has one c. Mea culpa–or more realistically mea reculpa.

Screenshot by request after the jump.

Amazing. Moments after I mastered the .QTL hack to make QuickTime movies launch in full-screen mode from a Web browser (!), Software Update informed me the new version finally supports fullscreen playback. I commenced downloading, headed over to MacFixIt to read about the other new features, and saw this:

The QuickTime 7.2 disaster: Breaks all CFM apps on Intel-based Macs (Office, Photoshop CS2) for some; Problems playing Flash

I’m running a dual G5, so apparently I’m safe, but I canceled the update anyway. What have your experiences been?

With one click, Spencer Critchley just eliminated the nail-dragging squeak my dual-G5 used to make every time it ran a complex screen saver or iTunes visualizer. His tip was to disable processor napping.

Click once, squeaks vanish. Disabling processor napping on my dual G5 eliminated the squeaking sounds it made when running complex visuals. But could there be any drawbacks?

Journalist and Mac geek Scott Walker had a great idea for an old Mac mini, a newspaper vending machine, and some Applescript: a home-made digital newsstand.

Here’s the gist of how it works:

The Mac Mini connects to the Internet and to my iTunes library through my home wireless network. Each morning the computer launches a script triggered by an iCal alarm. While cueing up a music playlist, the script automatically gathers images, crops them in half with GraphicConverter and launches a slideshow with PhotoPresenter, a nifty little $8 shareware program with lots of snazzy transitions.

It’s a lovely combination of hardware hack and smart software thinking, and the idea of putting the whole thing inside an old news rack bought from eBay is just genius. Needless to say, it makes me think that perhaps I shouldn’t sell that old redundant Mac mini of mine - I should think of a useful hack for it instead…

Via Technology Guardian

The official Apple iPhone keyboard video is here. Things that the keyboard does include intelligent type-ahead with word guessing, algorithms to correct for misaligned fingers, predictive resizing of a button’s press zones, intelligent capitalization correction, and more. Yes, there’s still not tactile feedback and I’m not sure if there’s much auditory feedback, and I’m not 100% buying into the punctuation and numbers separation, but it is surely a thing of beauty in and of itself. Go watch the video to see design ideas in action. I can’t wait to try this out.

My O’Reilly colleague Paul Weinstein has put together a very neat Mac hardware hack: he’s using an old Apple II machine as a terminal connected to a Mac mini. It’s a great way to recycle a chunk of old tech that a lot of other people would just throw away.

From Paul’s detailed write-up:

So virtual desktops is workable, but not perfect. What I need is the ability to off-load some of windows, ones that need to be visible even for a quick glance, as needed, an IRC conversation or the output of a running web process, for example. Taking a looking at the applications I depend on I see the beginnings of an idea. Terminal is an interesting application, a piece of software that’s mimicking what use to be a hardware function. Why can’t it be a hardware function again or at least why can’t it be running on a dedicated piece of cheap, reliable hardware?

To re-create his hack you’ll need a spare old-school Mac (hands up who’s got one or more of those lying around gathering dust), and a handful of easily-obtained cables and connectors.

About 2 weeks ago, my DSL modem started dying a slow, protracted, and painful death. Rather than fork over $80 to Earthlink, I went out to CompUSA and bought a noname modem for quite a bit less. Thanks go to BroadbandReport’s Earthlink DSL FAQ which revealed that I didn’t have to buy direct from Earthlink and pointed out the 0/35 VPI/VCI settings for whichever modem I bought.

In a kind of strange synergistic occurance, both Evan DiBiase over at 32584.com and I have been sleuthing (Evan’s “Nancy Drew” reference!) for new Yahoo!Sync references in OS X applications, specifically Address Book. My strings search (strings */Contents/MacOS/* | grep -i yahoo) found a good number of new Yahoo references, which you can examine after the jump. What’s more, Evan also found what completely escaped my notice: a Yahoo end-user licensing agreement in Address Book. (It’s in Contents/Resources/English.lproj/YEULA.html) Pop over to 32584.com to keep up to date on his discoveries.

Yesterday, the Surfin’ Safari blog introduced the newly updated completely redesigned Webkit Web Inspector, compatible with both Windows and Mac. Today, I fired up NightShift, installed the latest nightly build and gave it a go.

The new inspector has a completely different look from the old, translucent gray version. It gives you a lot more space to see things, the elements are all laid out more logically, and there’s far more control and overall usability than previous inspector.

Instead of the old-style red rectangles, the new version highlights items on the webpage using the new Safari-find style gray-overlay. You can see that in the picture here, with the selected item in the Inspector highlighted on the webpage behind it.

To be fair, the old style is in many ways “prettier” than the new one, but the new version fairly kicks the old style’s rear in terms of functionality. Nice work, Webkit dudes!

As a final note, for reasons I do not begin to understand, both the old and the new inspector seem to be in my current Webkit installation. Sometimes the new one loads when I inspect an element, sometimes the old one. Be persistent.

Update: The reason I ended up with both inspectors is that I had both the Webkit nightly build *and* the normal build of Safari running at the same time. I didn’t figure this out until the Window menu showed too few open windows that were clearly open.

A shot of the old-style inspector follows after the jump…

Over at TUAW, I posted about the new Yahoo!Sync framework that gets installed with the 10.4.10 update. I decided to do a little more technical snooping to see what goodies were inside this update and found quite a few phone-specific strings. These follow after the jump. Of particular interest may be the SIM references, the Conduit messages, and the kinds of data that can be synced (address book, calendar, tasks).

Windows users, freshly arrived on Mac OS X, always ask the same questions. One of those is “How do I create a new file in this folder?”

It’s understandable they ask this, because they’re accustomed to right-clicking in any Windows Explorer view, and seeing a list of contextual options which include creating a new file (text or otherwise) at that point.

Whether or not you’re a switcher from Windows, if you’ve been looking for a way of re-creating that behavior on Mac OS X, there are various options available to you.

Document Palette is a freeware application that uses empty template files and a system-wide shortcut to let you pick from a list of new files to add.

NuFile is another choice, which again uses templates you can edit.

On My Command can be used to achieve the same effect, but it’s a geekier solution (and a far more powerful tool as a result).

But my chosen solution is Yellow Camp Software’s New File, because it lets you choose the file type simply by typing in the full filename with extension; then, having created the new file, it opens it for you in the default editor for that filetype. Quick and easy and very convenient.

What’s more, if you open it in Automator and re-save as an Application, rather than as a Finder plug-in, you can then drag that application into the Finder’s toolbar, and it becomes a very handy one-click route to new file goodness.

Recently I had an Apache access log file on a remote server that I wanted to archive. However, it was 3GB, and /usr/bin/zip refused to even admit the behemoth’s existence.

First idea that came to mind was splitting the file into smaller chunks that zip could deal with. For some reason, the prospect of an arduous manual process that would take me through Flag Day didn’t appeal, so I poked around via apropos to see what was available:

$ apropos split

Lo and behold, at the end of a bunch of other stuff,

split(1) - split a file into pieces

(The server was running OS X 10.3, which as far as I can tell does not include the more direct zipsplit utility found on 10.4. Same basic idea, though.)

I copied the behemoth to a secondary drive (took a while) and then navigated to its directory.

$ ls -l

which let me know:

-rw------- 1 robert staff 4239286441 10 Jun 04:55 behemoth_log

That’s a lot of bytes. Since I want to get the largest file down to a svelte 500MB, I’ll need to use this:

$ split -b 500m behemoth_log

Which, after a long period of splitting, produces these:

$ ls -lh

-rw-------   1 robert  staff          3G 10 Jun 04:55 behemoth_log
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:18 xaa
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:19 xab
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:20 xac
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:20 xad
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:21 xae
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:22 xaf
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:22 xag
-rw-------   1 robert  staff        500M 10 Jun 05:23 xah
-rw-------   1 robert  staff         42M 10 Jun 05:23 xai

Alternatively I could have split it by kilobytes, or by number of lines using the -l line_count flag. There is also the ability to customize the output file names — read up on man split for more info. By the way, I’m guessing you want to limit your splitting to text files, so leave those binaries alone. See comments regarding using split on binaries as well.