It’s on Thursday, May 15 2008 beginning at 6:30 pm, and it’s at the Manchester Digital Development Agency, 117-119 Portland Street, Manchester M1 6ED. If you’re going to be in the area on Thursday, be sure to drop by!

We’re meeting at Baroque, 39-41 Broughton Street, Edinburgh, EH1 3JU, on Tuesday 13 May 2008, from 19:00. Email David (as requested in the post I’ve linked to above) if you’re coming along, and feel free to let me know here too.

This is just a note/update regarding my Cocoa source code, or rather two notes:

1. I’ve added a Donate button to the source code page. You’re of course always utterly welcome to use my code completely free of charge - and I’m really glad so many of you are finding it useful - but if you do feel like making a small donation to support my efforts, you can now do so easily. Any and all gratuities very much appreciated, etc. Enough said.

2. We’ve recently passed the 50 apps milestone on the Featured Apps page, which is just amazing. I’m thrilled that so many of you are finding a use for my code, and it’s an awesome feeling to check an app’s About box and see my name there (or as my mate Jim says, to see than an app “has Gemmell Inside”, a slogan I’m understandably forbidden by Lauren to use).

   If your app uses my code and you’d like it to be listed, please email me (contact info here), because I’d love to link to your site.

One final thing: remember that some of my code is now available via Subversion at svn.cocoasourcecode.com - always check to see if the package you want is there before downloading one of the zip files, because the repository will of course always have the most up to date version. Thanks!

So we hear today that Adobe is discontinuing GoLive, and I just wanted to mark the occasion. Way back in the day, I worked for GoLive Systems in evangelism/support, and I got the job because of how much I loved CyberStudio (Adobe GoLive’s original name, and Mac-only at the time).

I transitioned to Adobe just after the acquisition, and continued to work with GoLive for quite a while, predominantly as product manager for the GoLive SDK (my mission in life at the time). I think we did some great work, and whilst GoLive struggled against Dreamweaver in some respects (notably leaving your code the heck alone), I still think that the UI and general user experience of GoLive beats Dreamweaver’s hands down.

We also had a very loyal and incredibly friendly user community, particularly back in the Mac-only days, and I periodically re-read some of the old emails from the talklist (hosted by Blueworld at the time) with much fondness. The GoLive developers in Hamburg are also some of the finest people I’ve ever worked with, and I raise a glass to them all today.

Here’s a quick pic from the archives:

Above, you can see me in the dark red shirt (what the hell is going on with my hair?), Daniel Brown on the right of the picture (Photoshop/Web Products Evangelist at the time, as I recall), and you can even see John Nack further along, in the red polo shirt. John was product manager for LiveMotion back then (Adobe’s abortive Flash authoring software), and today he’s senior product manager for no less than Photoshop. His vanity email at Adobe at the time was “tinyelvis”, and mine was “hologram”.

There’s plenty of competition in the pro-level site creation/management area these days, with many of the most stunning apps still right here on the Mac OS (though not the same Mac OS as in the days of CyberStudio, of course), and Dreamweaver is an incredible tool. Macromedia realised early on that extensibility and customisation were key to remaining relevant and agile in the rapidly evolving web authoring space, and I have loads of respect for their work - hopefully we managed to learn something from them and bring some pretty good extensibility APIs to GoLive and the rest of the Adobe suite of applications.

Today, of course, it’s been years since I worked for Adobe, and I tend to do all my web authoring in BBEdit (I remember working with Rich Siegel way back in the day to give Barebones the necessary info to implement the CyberStudio Cleaner function in BBEdit, now GoLive Cleaner in the Markup > Misc menu), but I still have a huge soft spot for GoLive.

I have folders upon folders of old GoLive stuff that I hope to sort through and share some day, but for now here’s a small gift to mark the occasion. It’s a zip archive containing:

• The Cyberstudio icon, as a 32×32 PNG.
• The original “Designed with GoLive CyberStudio” badge, proudly displayed on many websites back in the day.
• The GoLive CyberStudio 3.0 Tutorial Guide PDF, which is quite a trip down memory lane.

Oh, and the unzipped folder comes equipped with the original CyberStudio 3 folder icon too, in all its pixely glory. Download it here and enjoy.

Here’s to GoLive CyberStudio, and everyone responsible for its many incarnations through the years. For the record, in terms of that first-launch feeling and the experience of suddenly realising what a new piece of software makes possible, it’s still by far the coolest app I’ve ever used.

First, some basic information. Icon Resource is a set of videos by Sebastiaan de With giving tutorials on icon design using Photoshop, aimed primarily at those with little or no icon design experience who want to create icons for Mac OS X. I’m thus definitely in the target market.

The complete pack of videos costs € 95 and the movies are provided in both high-definition Quicktime and also iPhone-ready format, so you can watch them either at your desktop computer or on the go. Photoshop source files are also provided for the tutorials so you can go in and inspect the specifics of the icons you see being created in the videos.

The Icon Resource site shows a list of all the videos included, and also offers a sample video you can watch before deciding whether or not to purchase access to the rest. Paying the fee gets you a login to the secure portion of the site, where you can download the videos and related materials at your leisure.

The video pack as a whole is split into two sections: a relatively brief set of Theory videos - covering the history of icons, what they are and how they’ve evolved over time, and some standards and guidelines to be aware of - and the longer Techniques section, in which Sebastiaan guides you through the creation of an application icon from start to finish, using Photoshop CS3.

The Theory videos take the form of running slideshows with continuous voiceover, beautifully presented (presumably with the able assistance of Keynote for the many tasteful transitions). These were interesting, particularly the visual timeline of the evolution of icon design and Sebastiaan’s view on how icons can be subdivided into functional categories.

The Standards and Guidelines movie, particularly, is where we begin to get into the nuts and bolts of observing how distinct classes of icon are subtly different from each other, and use unifying visual cues and “unwritten rules” to be consistent. We also learn the standard rotational offset of application icons on OS X (it’s 9° counterclockwise, incidentally). Mention of the Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines is also made, and a set of relevant links are provided for further reading in that area.

Then we move onto the Theory section. This section alone must run to around 2.5 hours of video instruction (rough estimate on my part), and begins with a gentle introduction and advice on how to think about the problem of creating an icon to represent a certain concept. This part was very useful to me as I tend to be very literal in expressing ideas (which probably goes with the territory for a software developer), so it was interesting to think in a more abstract way, and use word associations and metaphor to develop a visual way to concisely demonstrate the functionality of an application.

The tutorials move on to the basic principles of what Sebastiaan calls Software Illustration, and describes how his approach is based on fundamentally 2-dimensional illustration using Photoshop, rather than the use of 3D rendering software. I found this encouraging, because a big part of my trepidation about icon design was due to today’s ever-larger icons requiring near-photorealistic images, and I have very little experience with 3D software. The Icon Resource videos aim to demonstrate that it’s possible to go very far in icon design without necessarily having to fire up modelling and rendering software.

A large part of the focus of the techniques in the videos is centered around Photoshop’s Shape Layers. I use these semi-regularly in my own work, but I learned several things within the first 10 minutes of video that I’ll find constantly useful, including managing multiple shapes within a single layer. The videos move on towards what becomes a recurring theme: the use of blending modes and gradient overlays to create realistic shading and a sense of depth and three-dimensionality in what moments before were simple two-dimensional shapes. This technique is refined and expanded throughout many of the later videos.

I was then guided through how to create the correct perspective and apparent light-source in icons, and how to fix common mistakes and enhance realism of shadows and highlights. It’s actually quite stunning to see how little time and effort is needed to create very realistic effects when you know what you’re doing (and indeed have had enough practice). Of course, shading and perspective alone aren’t enough for realism, so Sebastiaan then discusses and demonstrates the creation and application of textures (for the wood grain of a pencil and for the bristles of a paintbrush) using only standard built-in Photoshop filters, with impressive results.

With the “tool” elements of the icon done, we move on to a detailed treatment of the classic document icon complete with page-curl, which is created from scratch as you watch. By this point, the viewer is more familiar with some of the techniques shown, and I found myself starting to anticipate the general means to achieve certain shadow and highlight effects - I genuinely felt that I was learning, even though in that instance I wasn’t following along with my own copy of Photoshop. The videos go into some detail about shadows, including the use of multiple overlaid shadows to more faithfully represent how objects cast shadows in the real world, and Sebastiaan constantly advises using real objects as a periodic point of reference.

After several test compositions of all the icon elements created so far, and corresponding tweaks and improvements, we move onto the art of resizing and retouching icons for all the various sizes they might be shown at on Mac OS X, including the very small sizes sometimes seen in the Finder or toolbars or document titlebars or such. This was a part I was tempted to skip over, foreseeing a lot of backtracking and painstaking recreation, but again I was impressed at how quickly a retouch could be done to rework a 128×128 pixels or larger icon for 32×32 and 16×16 pixel sizes (the originals worked with in the videos are very much larger, at 4096×4096).

Lastly, we cover creating actual icon files and images for use in applications and on the web, with mention of both Icon Composer (part of the OS X Developer Tools) and also IconFactory’s excellent IconBuilder. Finally we receive an encouraging send-off, with a quick display of high-speed showmanship of how to use the included sample files to create a convincing blueprints-style document icon.

The sample files include all the major stages of the creation of the final icon plus various extras, including all the composition and shadow tests shown in the videos, and will be extremely useful for following along and also for reference later in your own work.

Sebastiaan’s speaking style is unhurried and easy to follow, and the video and sound quality are excellent. I genuinely feel like I learned a lot about what was previously something of a black art to me, and I couldn’t help but come away feeling enthusiastic about the prospect of creating some of my own icons for future software projects - or just for fun.

Given the quality and quantity of material on offer, including fully layered original Photoshop PSD files for each major stage, the € 95 price tag seems like the bargain of the century. If you have any interest at all in learning more about icon design and even trying your hand at making your own icons, I can wholeheartedly recommend Icon Resource.

My Mario Kart Wii Friend Code is 1590-4853-7385 (Matt, UK), so feel free to add me and post your own MK Friend Code in the comments here. Only two rules, if I may:

• Say a little bit about yourself. I like to know something about those I’m adding to my Friend Roster. Waivers willingly offered to those I clearly already know, or talk to on Twitter fifty times a day. ;)
• No “I added all you guys above, please add me!” posts, please - this isn’t intended to be a forum.

Hopefully I’ll see you on Luigi Circuit… and beyond. I’ll be the one biting his wheel-controller and unsportingly calling you a CHEAT-HOLE.

You can browse them, add your own, or fetch them into your own desktop or web application (by loading the contents of the “no formatting” URL). You can also click the error-number to go a permalink for each error, in case you want to link people to your favourite errors.

Just a bit of fun on a Friday. :)

Secret bonus info:

• You can visit /all (and /plain/all for non-formatted) to view all errors at once (newest first).
• You can visit /latest (and /plain/latest for non-formatted) to view just the newest error.

(Please do get my code from the repository if it’s available there, because I don’t guarantee to update the zip files in a timely manner for code which is also in the repo, but the repo is always up to date. Thanks!)

MGViewAnimation was updated to properly deal with flipped views during animation - many thanks to Simon Ward for pointing out the problem and supplying the fix (Simon, if you want me to link your name here to a website, email me again with the URL).

MGTwitterEngine was updated to no longer delete your Twitter.com cookies by default when setting a username and password for the authenticating user. This used to be necessary, but is no longer so since we now don’t use NSHTTPCookieStorage for authentication. You can still enable the old behavior via a new accessor method if you need to, but things should hopefully be fine - and as a bonus, you now won’t have to login to Twitter again in Safari after running an MGTwitterEngine-using app. I’ve copied the relevant new section from MGTwitterEngine’s README.txt file below, which explains things in more detail.

About twitter.com cookies

Like most web sites/services, twitter.com sets cookies on your computer when you authenticate with their server. These cookies (stored in NSHTTPCookieStorage) are shared amongst all applications which use NSURLConnection (including Safari and many more).

MGTwitterEngine does not use those cookies, since it does its own direct authentication in the URLs of the requests it makes to the twitter servers. For this reason, as of version 1.0.4 (11th April 2008), it does not attempt to clear any saved cookies for twitter.com when you set a username and password for MGTwitterEngine to use. However, previous versions of MGTwitterEngine did indeed clear twitter’s cookies whenever you called the -setUsername:password: method, in order to avoid an old and now fixed possibility of using the wrong credentials for the next request. There are two outcomes from this:

1. MGTwitterEngine no longer clears your twitter.com cookies, so for example you will now no longer have to re-login to Twitter in Safari after using an app which includes MGTwitterEngine. You would usually only have had to re-login with Safari once, but it was still an annoyance if you regularly used Twitter both on the web and with an MGTwitterEngine-using client. This should be fixed now.

2. In the unlikely event that you have any authentication problems when your MGTwitterEngine-using app switches from one Twitter account to another (for example, after switching accounts you still get data back from the old account, at least for the very first new request), you can easily re-enable the old cookie-clearing behaviour. Simply call the method -setClearsCookies: passing YES as the argument, and then call -setUsername:password: again, and all should be well.

The code shows how to:

• Easily set up a FolderSweeper in a given folder (choosing whether to follow symlinks/aliases or not).
• Approve or reject further processing of files/folders as necessary.
• Determine whether a given file conforms to a given UTI (Uniform Type Identifier), in this case text.
• Retrieve the memory-mapped contents of files.
• Perform text encoding-detection (or sniffing) to determine how to interpret the text file.
• And quite probably more.

We’ve commented the class and also the demo code quite heavily, so it should be immediately useful. You can always grab the latest version of the code from my public Subversion repository here: http://svn.cocoasourcecode.com/FolderSweep, and Rainer will be putting a zip file of the current version up on his site later today.

If you’re not sure how to access a Subversion repository, just launch Terminal, cd to wherever you want to keep the code, and then type this command:

svn co http://svn.cocoasourcecode.com/FolderSweep

You’ll get a copy of the code in your current working directory.

Send any bug reports or enhancement requests either to Rainer (preferably) or to me. Enjoy!

The reason is pretty obvious. Up until now, Cocoa development experience was useful for one thing and one thing only: creating software for Mac OS X. Now, suddenly, our skills are directly applicable (pretty much right down to API level) to one of the hottest and most talked-about platforms out there - the iPhone. The currency of our expertise just appreciated significantly. But even that isn’t the whole story.

To develop for iPhone, you use Xcode. To use Xcode, you need to be running Mac OS X. The lure of the iPhone will bring people to our platform, and not just any people: developers. Developers don’t just do their day-job work and then shutdown the machine; they explore, they experiment, and above all they write code. It’s hard not to be excited by the prospect of what that could mean for OS X.

The iPhone SDK won’t split the market for Cocoa developers, it’ll expand it. Once again it’s a great time to be a Mac user. Which brings me to my last, brief, point: like many of you, I have an iPhone app in the works, of course, but I’d also just like to let you know that I’m available for iPhone development work. If you’re interested in discussing your project with me, I invite you to swing by my redesigned Cocoa consulting site at Instinctive Code. End of advertisement.

I have high hopes for June and the launch of the App Store, and I can’t wait to see some of the amazing iPhone software we all no doubt have in development right now. I think it’s going to be awesome.

(For what it’s worth, this post was written entirely on an iPod Touch.)