Core Data: the most interesting part of OS X Tiger

Developing with Core Data

This, to me, is the most interesting part of OS X Tiger -- though Tiger's metadata model is also very interesting.

Core Data, new in Tiger, completes the Cocoa vision for building well-factored applications based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern by providing a strong, flexible, and powerful data model framework...

...Firstly, in the same way that Interface Builder vastly simplifies creating user interfaces, Core Data lets you quickly define your application's data model in a graphic way and easily access it from your code. Secondly, Core Data provides an infrastructure to deal with common functionality such as undo and redo and data persistence, allowing you to get on with the task of building innovation into your application.

... The technically correct way to describe Core Data is as an object-graph management and persistence framework...

... Core Data builds on some of the concepts of enterprise-class database application frameworks, such as the Enterprise Objects Framework in WebObjects...

...All changes to the objects managed by Core Data happen in memory and are transient until they are committed to disk. To commit changes to the data model to disk, simply send a save: message to the managed object context. This behavior preserves the traditional document semantics that users expect in document-based applications.

... In Tiger, Core Data support three different kinds of data store formats to save managed objects contexts to. These formats are:

* XML file format
* Binary archive file format
* SQLite database file format

Each of these formats has its strengths and weaknesses. The XML format is a good testing format as it is fairly human readable. The binary format is not human readable, but provides better performance than the XML format. Both of these formats are atomic—in other words, the entire data model is read from disk and saved to disk in a single operation.

The last format, the SQLite format, is the most scalable and fastest. SQLite is an open source embedded database that is included in Tiger and has many properties which make it an ideal data storage layer for Core Data.

I have a feeble hope that we'll get a "pro" version of iPhoto based on this framework that will actually, maybe, perhaps ... work.

Dreamhost: a high quality OS X friendly ISP

MacInTouch Home Page

Dave Yost: About a year ago on MacInTouch I learned about DreamHost. I moved my web sites there and never looked back. In addition to all their other features (not to mention their low prices), as of yesterday I can now access my 2.4GB of DreamHost disk space in the Finder via AppleShare! [Another good, Mac-friendly hosting provider is MacWeb.com, one of this site's sponsors. -MacInTouch]

A Better Finder Rename (OS X): now creates NTFS compliant names

MacInTouch Home Page

A Better Finder Rename 6.9 is a contextual menu module for renaming multiple files with numerous options, including regular expression substitution and the date and time from a digital photo's EXIF metadata. This release can not only convert Macintosh files names to legal Windows NTFS file names, but also take into account limitations of the SMB Windows file sharing service. A Better Finder Rename is $19.95 for Mac OS X.

NTFS compliance is a significant issue nowadays when sharing photos. This feature justifies the update for most of us paid users.

Furl: archive pages and search them

LookSmart's Furl - Learn More

SiteSucker for OS X: transfer a remote web site to a local machine

SiteSucker
I've used similar software on my PC. I'd like to see if I can use this to create a local version of my Blogger pages. It has a great versiontracker rating.

AppRocket: A LaunchBar clone for Windows?

Candy Labs - AppRocket

LaunchBar 3 for OS X was an essentially perfect application. Yeah, I know about QuickSilver. There's even a LaunchBar 4.01 which is supposed to be a nice update -- but why mess with perfection? I paid for LaunchBar and I love it.

I've looked without success for a Windows equivalent. Today I idly typed in an old google search 'launchbar for windows'. It returned AppRocket, now on version 1.2.

On first inspection this is basically a clone of LaunchBar 1.x. Alas, it didn't work for me. On an initial test it didn't seem to be detecting directories or folders (!?!)*. I assumed this was a glitch of the initial (very long) indexing process, but before I could retest AppRocket threw an uncaught exception and crashed. The crashed process continued to consume 40GB of drive space, but I was able to eventually restart XP. (BTW, I thought .NET apps weren't supposed to do that sort of thing any more ...)

It looks like I'll stick with my home-brewed WCD-powered folder-navigator solution for now. I'll try again with 1.3.

---

* One would assume any application designed to support navigation would do at least as well as Norton Change Directory (later integrated into Norton Commander 3.x) -- the perfect application for folder navigation (vintage 1989). Incredibly, application designers consistently ignore the metadata implicit in an enclosing folder. Several 'file location/navigation' utilities for Windows that I've evaluated completely ignore directories! Even some of much celebrated full text search programs don't return matches on folder/directory substrings! (Yahoo Desktop Search, my current somewhat-favorite, does match on directories.)

I do find it fascinating that truly superb ideas in software can be quite successful, then vanish and never be fully implemented again. Compared to what we attempt to do today, NCD was a trivial, utterly simple application. And yet, there's no reliable modern equivalent available on the dominant Windows platform. I think we can only explain this sort of market failure by comparison to the idiosyncratic "choices" of systems ruled by the peculiarities of evolution and natural selection.

5/21/06: I did eventually buy a later, more stable, version of AppRocket. It's ok, but it's definitely not in the same exalted class as LaunchBar. Worth the money though.

Update 6/07: I forget what happened, but I soured on AppRocket. Buggy I believe, and in the end far inferior to LaunchBar. Later, I think, Google bundled similar functionality into their desktop search engine.

How to create an annotated multimedia Google map

HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map - Engadget - www.engadget.com.

I assume someone will shortly automate this process with a handy software app. A fascinating overview of how open standards benefit from network effects.

Free visuals and stock photographs

Where To Find Great Free Photographs And Visuals For Your Own Online Articles - Robin Good's Latest News

An excellent overview of sites that have free photos available for use in presentations. A great way to spice up corporate presentations.

iDVD and image distortion

Macintouch iPhoto (Part 13)

This Macintouch article was written for iPhoto export, but this is really a global issue with 16:9 vs. 6:4 vs. 4:3 video. The idea of "using a mask" in QT Pro to transform video is new to me, but sounds generally applicable.

Albert Poon

iPhoto 5 added the ability to export slideshows with the Ken Burns effect included. However,iPhoto 5 exports slideshows to iDVD as 720 x 480 QuickTime movies. iDVD is expecting 640 x 480. When iDVD imports the 720 pixel wide movie, it squeezes the image and distorts it.

To quickly change the aspect ratio for the slideshow movie and have your pictures appear right, open the movie in QuickTime Pro and simply add a 640 x 480 mask to the video track and resave the movie. Now import the resized movie that conforms to the size iDVD is looking for.

OS X DMG utility (disk image)

FreeDMG product page

I often create disk images, including some for iPhoto Library "merges" and others for storing OS X files on an SMB share. This utility should be very useful.

iDVD is complex, this site helps

iDVD FAQ

Make sure you are using the latest QuickTime, and as always, work with high quality source material (properly sized photos [640 X 480] for slides and/or properly processed digital video [ 720 X 480] for movies). iDVD 4 & 5 now use the same encoding technology used in Compressor 1.2 and DVD Studio Pro 2.0.5…the same codec as Apple’s professional video utility, ‘Compressor’.

Compressor uses a 2-pass VBR encoding method that first analyzes the entire file and then uses that data during a second pass encoding stage to intelligently distribute bit allocation per frame. The result? An optimized MPEG-2 file with consistent visual quality.

Ok, this is complicated. Good site.

MaxEmail: send/receive fax service.

Do you know the MAC number of your hardware?

MacInTouch Home Page

Good advice in Macintouch (from a reader). In addition to storing the serial numbers of devices, also recard the ethernet MAC address. That number uniquely identifies most laptops and most theives won't touch it.

Free FullWrite Professional is still out there

Free FullWrite Professional™ Document Processor

Dave Trautman's site allows one to download a full copy of the last version of FullWrite Professional. If MORE 3.1 was the ultimate outliner (OmiOutliner Pro 3.x may rival it now), then FullWrite Pro was the ultimate wordprocessor. Like MORE, it's now available for free.

It apparently runs in the OS X classic emulation mode, though it gives a FOND error message that can be ignored. I remember FW Pro as a monster -- it required megabytes (at least one) of hard drive space and maybe 1-2 megabytes of memory. It really strained my SE/30. It was also buggy when I used its full features in the earlier versions, but it was an astounding wordprocessor. It was also a quite decent outliner.

iPod sound quality: Shuffle > iPod 3G > iPod Mini > iPod Photo?

Opinion Column: Shuffle's Got a Secret

Fascinating. There's more to an 'mp3 player' than a hard drive.

The iPod shuffle's near-perfect rendering of the square wave means that it uses push-pull output instead of the single-ended, capacitor-coupled output found in just about every other player. You just can't get this kind of audio performance from a single-ended circuit. I find Apple's audiophile approach exciting on several different levels. You can hear the improvement; will Apple incorporate the same technology in future hard drive players? And technologically, it's fascinating. My inner geek wants answers to half a dozen questions, including how they're generating the negative power supply voltage and whether they've gone with a capacitorless design. I've asked Apple, but so far the company is mum.

I believe I proved that my ears were right: Several other hard drive players edge out older Apple players, but the iPod shuffle does them all one better. I think I also proved conclusively that the iPod mini's output capacitors are woefully undersized, as some audiophiles have been saying since Apple introduced the device. I also found that the iPod mini has lots of harmonic distortion—everywhere but at the industry-standard 1-KHz measuring point.

A Macintouch article claims the newer iPod Photos have sound quality substantially worse than the older iPods. I'm glad the audiophiles are starting to test these things out.