degrunt.net

Cappuccino

Tom — Sat, 15 May 2010 20:00:48 +0000

Again I’m amazed by what the guys from 280North pulled off. First their framework (UI) is absolutely gorgeous, second they web&desktop example (GitHub Issues) is … well, everything I hoped for.

I’m just still a bit put-offish by Objective-J, though I’m starting to appreciate why they introduced it.

SC.TreeController and SC.Record

Tom — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:50:24 +0000

Just added an example to github which shows how to use SC.Record in a SC.TreeController.

The example is available here

Sugar & Spice for Espresso

Tom — Mon, 03 May 2010 18:16:16 +0000

In real life this would probably taste awful, but for the Espresso editor it’s great! Sugars allow you to extend the Espresso editor with add-ons or plugins, which will ease your development.

Today I’ve found two tasty Sugars: Zen Coding is one of them (though it is in Espresso by default) and Spice. Well, okay I was pointed to Zen Coding by a colleague actually…

Zen Coding allows you to expand certain abbreviations, look at the following video for more information:

Zen Coding v0.5 from Sergey Chikuyonok on Vimeo.

Next Spice, that allows you to extend Espresso using JavaScript, with full access to the Espresso and Cocoa API, no need to talk Objective-C for that!

MongoDB REST Interface

Tom — Sun, 02 May 2010 20:22:42 +0000

Just pushed my first attempt at a MongoDB REST Interface to github, it’s written for node.js.
MongoDB is a very cool document based database, but they themselves described it better:

MongoDB bridges the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and highly scalable) and traditional RDBMS systems (which provide rich queries and deep functionality).

The minute I read about MongoDB I immediately thought of using it with SproutCore, using Rails for this purpose seemed like a lot of overhead. Because node.js is very hot at the moment, I immediately thought about creating a module for it.

To use it all, you would have to install MongoDB and node.js. To see it in action, you could download the Todos tutorial code. Create a ‘tasks’ database and a ‘tasks’ collection. Be sure to change the flavor to “sproutcore” in settings.json. Start the REST server and be sure to connect to the MongoDB server by using your browser and go to “http://localhost:3000/#connect”.

Then use
this instead of the tutorial’s datasource.

Ideally I would publish this as a seed, but haven’t gotten around doing that. Also, I’ve tested this with node.js v0.1.93.

Google Contacts to vCard (3.0)

Tom — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Today I’ve been experimenting with the Google Contacts Data Data API (for Java). My first project has resulted in code with which I can upload contact photos to Google fairly simple. Quickly after that I created my second project, which exports Google Contacts into vCard 3.0 format, of course including photos. Strangely, this is something which the standard export from Google Contacts can not (yet) do.

Fairly instrumental in the export to vCard project is the iCal4j-vcard project, which has a nice API to manipulate and output vCards. Initially I had some struggles with the VCardOutputter class, which somehow resulted in “I/O Errors”, but for now I’ve just used vCard#toString.

The iCal4j-vcard project is part of the iCal4j project. The iCal4j project implements the iCalendar specification, for creating calendar entries with Java. They also have a good example for using iCal4j with Android.