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.

Interface and eye candy seem to be taking a prominent role in recent Mac developer’s minds. Just ask Dustin MacDonald. But whatever your view, there comes a time when you need something to fly across the screen, bounce up and down or just move. In other words, animate. And animate you shall, with Simon Haertel’s excellent Animation Toolbox 3. Also used extensively in his Mac version of Tetris, Quinn, the toolbox makes things like bouncing and sliding look natural and sleek - with hardly any code.

If it’s animating views you’re after, Matt Gemmell has got you covered. Initially having trouble with NSViewAnimation, someone neglected to tell him that it needs to be subclassed. However, Matt has recovered from his lapse in, uh, frustration and created a little sample animating views subclass. From his blog:

It’s a partial rework of Todd’s NSAnimation Demo code, which subclasses NSAnimation directly and updates all the animated views’ frames itself in the same thread for better perceived performance. For basic “animate a bunch of views at once” uses, you should be able to just change NSViewAnimation to MGViewAnimation and go with it… But please read these caveats:

• This thing is barely tested at all
• It will probably only work for views (not views and windows, as NSViewAnimation does)
• It doesn’t attempt to do the fade-effects that NSViewAnimation does (though that should be trivial to implement if you need it)

At the very least it’s a good starting point for folk having issues with NSViewAnimation, and just as a general example. I hope someone finds it useful, and a big thanks again to Todd for his original code.

Matt Gemmell

You can download his MGViewAnimation project from Gemmell’s Source Code page.