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Yesterday I encountered a very strange bug/feature in Xcode. I just couldn’t run any application in Release configuration anymore. I always got “The Debugger has exited with status 1.” in the run-log. In debug configuration they worked, without Xcode they worked, in gdb they worked, but as soon as I tried to start them in Xcode in Release configuration it didn’t work. Not even a fresh new Project would work.

I tried removing the prefs but that didn’t help. But it seemed to be user-dependent. I could run my Projects in Release configuration when I logged in as another user.

This morning I saw the “GDB Log” setting in the Debugging Prefs. I activated them and compared the logs of Debug configuration and Release configuration. And this really showed the bug. I had a binary of a System-Framework in my Release folder and instead of the system-version it linked the application to this binary. To my bad it was a binary from a different mac, which is still running 10.4. This made the app exit right when it was started.
The solution was as simple as removing this binary from the Release-folder.

This GDB log is really a lifesaver sometimes!

Karsten

I just created yet another class with some instance variables and so missed the functionality of creating accessor methods for these instvars automatically. As I never really looked into the Refactorings of Xcode 3 I didn’t notice that they provide an encapsulation refactoring. Using this on an instvar nicely generates accessor methods. You have to apply it to all your instvars separately, but still it’s a great gain.

One thing they should improve though: why is the refactor command no submenu which shows all the available refactorings? This way the refactoring could be chosen much simpler.

Karsten

I think I’ll be in Chicago tomorrow evening. I’d really love to join in for PSIG, but I don’t have any idea on how to get there best, can anyone tell me how to get there? I’ll arrive in Chicago at 5pm and I’ll stay in Downtown near Harrison-Station at the Grand Park. I guess I can’t make it to PSIG in time, but I guess you guys don’t meet up just 5 minutes

Karsten

There have been quite a lot of news about blocks in C recently. What I wonder however is: will there be a Objective-C block object that wraps such a new C block?

Thing is: You can’t send messages to C-Blocks, they’re just as primitiv as an int, or a float, even if they’re more complex. In Obj-C you also have string literals like @”a string”, which you can send messages to. Why not also have literal blocks like @[:arg | arg doSomething]? I think that would really make live a bit easier sometimes.

@[:arg | arg doSomething] might look a bit too smalltalkish for some people, but on the other hand the selectors in Obj-C also look just as cool as in Smalltalk.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing blocks in Cocoa.

Karsten

Yesterday at Esug Conference’s Social Event the winners of this year’s Innovation Award were announced. At Georg Heeg eK I worked on seaBreeze for the last half year. I’m proud to say that our project seaBreeze won the second price. The third price was given to iSqueak, a Squeak implementation for i-devices. The first price went to Dr. Geo, a tool for schools where they teach geografie.

seaBreeze is an Interface Builder like web-application to create websites using the Smalltalk based web application framework Seaside. It is either possible to start from scratch or to scaffold a user interface and take this as a basis to start in seaBreeze.

seaBreeze is soon to be available in the Cincom Public Repository. It’s licensed under MIT License so go and try it yourself! There’s also a commercial license, in case you need warranty and support.

Karsten

So, a few days ago I released Cards, a freeware application for the iPhone to manage credit card. Is really easy to use and has little features, I have mostly coded it for myself but then I’ve been asked to put it on the AppStore. So, I lazily posted it on the AppStore, without doing any webpage and stuff like that.

Worst decision ever.

Apparently, a lot, and I mean a lot of people thought about something which didn’t even cross my mind: that the application may call home and report data! Indeed, there was no good reason to trust “Michele Balistreri” (I was sure I used Briksoftware name, but whatever). Now I quickly setup a page and wrote this blog post in the hope to stop triggering paranoid alerts. Thanks to the (few) ones who decided to just trust Michele Balistreri and probably Apple’s review procedure. I hope those enjoy the benefits of the application.

For those of you wondering about the purpose of the application, I’ll just say one thing: I kept my PIN codes in my addressbook under strange names because I would forget them. Not only thats not secure, but I kept forgetting which card had a certain PIN, which created awkward situations in stores.

Today we released what we call Snapplr Beta 2. In practice we’ve been releasing many updates but we now have reached some important milestones. We have simplified the first start wizard, to avoid confusion induced by the “firewalled” status that would show up quite often (correctly, but it didn’t mean that Snapplr wouldn’t work).

Now, on Leopard, Windows screenshot include shadows and we have optimized performances in Area screenshots.

We have been receiving a lot of feedback this days. I’d like to thank everyone for their support and we’ll do our best to satisfy all requests!

Yesterday we released Snapplr’s beta. We thought 100 users would have been enough to gather enough feedback, and we surely wouldn’t get him in less than a week. It turns out we were wrong, there are already 200 registered users, and we think we will not pull the signup page too soon to allow more people to test the application.

Thank you very much for your interest in Snapplr!

Briksoftware is proud to announce that after months of work we finally opened the beta to our brand new tool Snapplr. Snapplr is the first product that Michele and I developed together.

Basically Snapplr is a total replacement for the system’s screenshot facilities. The only difference is that screenshots are instantly uploaded to Snapplr.com and the link is put on the clipboard. If you have a static IP and don#t want to use Snapplr.com, you can also host the images locally via the build in web-server. The images will be stored for 1 day currently, after that the images will be deleted automatically. We’re not sure about the time interval though, but typically you don’t need to share snaps that are older than a day.

Another very nice feature is the Live mode which allows you to choose an area, a window or a whole screen for capturing. The url is put on the clipboard and whenever you open this url it will take a screenshot and send it to the browser, perfect for showing someone what you’re working on without setting up a whole vnc session or what not.

The beta is limited to the first 100 people that sign up, so if you want to give it a try, go to snapplr.com and register

Press Release

This year’s Esug Conference (the 16th!!) is going to be in Amsterdam from 25-29th August.

The weekend before Esug is Camp Smalltalk, a meeting with others from the conference where you can exchange ideas, code together with others or just hanging out with other Smalltalkers.

This is, besides C4, one of the reasons to hope the summer passes by quickly :-D.
On the other hand there’s also a bunch of parties to hope that the summer doesn’t pass by too quick

Anyway, I hope to see some of you guys at one or both of the conferences!

Karsten