Having been contact by the creator of the Fumo interface concept, Pavel, I am starting work on creating the a brand spanking new interface for Quicksilver. Take a look at the mockups he’s created.

While various difficulties (trying to write a plugin on top a system that I can’t see, using subclasses that I can’t see the implementations for, etc.) are proving to be tough challenges, Alcor (Nicholas Jitkoff) and ytrewq1 have been and are continuing to be most helpful in providing help when I need it. Alcor has already provided code for the “window” interface that I will be building on top of on, and ytrewq1 has assisted in overcoming various programming hurdles and provided some welcome encouragement.

That’s what’s so great about the Apple Mac Developer community - they’re ready to help people out and provide whatever assistance they can. Sure beats the “read the incoherent documentation” or “Google it” approach employed by various other operating systems regarding development troubleshooting.

And if you don’t know what Quicksilver is, or don’t use it, it’s time to get up and walk out of that dusty cave. Trust me, it’ll relegate Finder, Automator, and System Preferences to “lost somewhere in the HD”. It’s the best thing that happened to productivity, and once you start to tap into it’s power, you realize how much more it has. For example, I had a workflow to scale images. While playing around with the Quicksilver’s preferences, I found that you not only scale images, but also convert images to/from psd, jpg, png, gif, and a plethora of other formats. You can change your desktop background, move / copy / rename / delete files, add and delete lines from files without opening them, get into, do a Spotlight search. You can also add triggers (hotkeys), and integrate it with just about any application that exists. I mean, seriously, this thing is powerful. Get it now, use it now, and wait for Fumo.

Update: Download a (still unstable) version of Fumo from this post.

Sean Patrick O’Brien, a fairly new Cocoa developer has recently released an iLife Controls framework. This allows you to create HUD Windows and controls such as buttons, sliders, popup menus etc. and also a smooth metal type window (again with controls such as buttons and frames).

Heads-up-display with a window, subclassed with the framework.

With everyone trying to keep up with Apple’s interface additions, this isn’t a bad way to go about it. The framework includes a lot of subclasses and some of them needed to be added to Interface Builder in order for the hierarchy to show, so I’ve uploaded a simple project to show what this framework can do. It’s not completely bug-free; in fact, there are quite a number of creepy-crawlies, but the idea is there, and this looks to be the beginning of quite a handsome project.

Download sample project

Download just the framework source

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to thank Sean