Why Pendulum Sync was a bad idea

10Jul10

I’ve now stopped development of pendulum sync. I thought it was a great idea, but then I started using dropbox. Dropbox works a treat. it synchronises all of the files I want and I can also easily synchronise those files that aren’t intended necessarily to be synchronised. That was the space that pendulum sync was meant to exist, I’m happy to admit as a delighted drop box user that, pendulum sync was wrong and svn was correct. i did briefly consider using Pendulum sync as a helper app for drop box, it could allow you to hunt out those tricky little apps with “hidden” datasets on the Mac, but it’s not a money making venture that i’m willing to explore any further, so this is the last pendulum sync post. l’ll always maintain that it was a good idea, though one that would only be useful as an integrated part of Dropbox or similar. I won’t make a million dollars on the idea, so onto the next one.

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Dicer! Website Live

11Oct09

Website now live for Dicer! download. Have fun and please add any comments and suggestions here.

Download Dicer!

http://www.coralquest.com/dicer/

Can you beat my high score of 286??

Incidentally – have added a temporary icon from wikipedia (search for dice). It’s on a share and share alike license, so consider this my attribution. Thx.

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Dicer! – Added Specular Highlights

11Oct09

The original dice graphics were done in less than 2 minutes. I spent a little longer to get them lined up properly and added a little specular highlight to imply a little depth. Also surrounded the chosen dice in a little box, makes the results much easier to read. Also fixed a bug where previous scores were reset to zero (visible in the previous post’s screenshot on Four of a kind which should read 26/30) – problem was an uninitialised array.

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Diversion

11Oct09

Well Snow Leopard has put my gas at a peep a little bit. My Pendulum Sync software works quite well until I’m forced to think about different versions of OSX, especially when there have been serious changes under the hood. I’ll still continue with Pendulum Sync though, it’s a good idea that needs doing. I can use online sync services (like dropbox for example) to share my files, but for those mysterious repositories hidden within applications (like delicious library for example), pendulum sync will be the way to do it.

Anyway, the title of this post is diversion. I’m currently reading O’Reilly’s head first Object Oriented Analysis & Design. I’m rather enjoying the Head First approach with all the little doodles etc. The Head First book challenged me to think about my last major project with an eye to improving the architectural decisions therein. Now most of my work is paper based with forrays into database design and report writing, so I didn’t really have a project to be working with (the design of P.Sync is very classical, so it didn’t suit the requirements for OO analysis and design).

I needed a project to work through to become a perfect example of OO design. I was also stuck on an aeroplane for 13 hours with (crap) movies that I’d already watched on the road out. My (very retro) mobile phone has one redeeming feature – yahtzee! so I decided to write a Yahtzee! implementation for OSX. I’m guessing that Yahtzee! is a trademark, so I’ll use the name Dicer!

After the flight was finished, here is the result. Features straight Yahtzee! scoring (no bonus), ‘n’ players and crucially uses an AppController -> Players -> Player -> Dice -> Die object model. Now I’m sure that the AppController knows way too much about how dice work etc. but I think I’ve got a good model to build upon.

Side branch is teaching the computer to play against me, my mobile phone can do it, so how hard can it be!

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Finally got 2 peers talking to each other properly!

09Aug09

After what seems like an age banging my head against a brick wall, I’ve finally worked out why my peers couldn’t quite talk properly. I was attempting to return an NSImage as a distributed objects parameter. This worked fine if the object was distributed on the same physical machine, but as soon as I tried to send it to another peer, it just didn’t work and more strangely actually displayed the images on the bottom left hand corner of the senders window, very strange. Anyway, the fix (as always) was simple. I encoded the NSImage TIFFRepresentation as an NSData object and sent that over then decoded at the far side. This screenshot shows the results of that labour, most satisfying! Now onto building an app out of all these bits I’ve constructed…

On the left is this computer’s information and on the right is the received Peer information (the lock/unlock icons are just hard coded at the moment.

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Distributed Objects with Peer to Peer networking

13Jul09

Well… the networking component took a great step forward today. I have completed my little sample application for peer to peer distributed objects. It’s a combination of the browser model demonstrated by the picture browser example and standard distributed objects. Next step is to componentise this code to give myself a nice new plugin for my library – peer to peer networking. Then I’ll plug this into the Pendulum Sync codebase. I found this rather difficult to achieve, so the sense of satisfaction at the creation of the silly little test app was immense!

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New Battery

07Jun09

I bought an off-brand battery on ebay for £60, good deal I thought, until the damn thing overheated and buckled out of shape. My trackpad stopped working and my macbook got very hot. Thankfully it’s OK now. I got a real battery from apple instead. If you visit the genius bar, you get a battery for £77 when you trade in the old one. That’s good value and you get a real apple battery. I’m currently trying to send back the old one for a refund. The email I got from them is a little strange….

We are really sorry for the trouble caused to you.
Would you mind telling us your laptop model and your old battery code? Just wonder if your adapter and the system of the laptop is fine?
We will issue the RMA and returned details for you after getting your reply.
Have a nice day!

I sent my reply back to them on the 3rd of June and I’m still waiting for a response

Thanks for responding. The laptop is a mid 2007 Macbook Pro
17″ 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The battery model number is:
A1189 – 10.8V 68Wh. Power Supply is E131881 – 18.5V (4.6A) /
16.5V (3.6A).

The adapter has never caused me any trouble in the past and
the laptop is now working correctly with a new Apple brand
battery.

I’ll leave it another couple of days and then use paypal dispute system.

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Tags: battery

fmdb fails in default Build release

18May09

I had an annoying problem when using fmdb where my debug build would work, but failed when I tried to do the release build. The problem was error: ‘asm’ undeclared (first use in this function). This was an error from the FMDatabase.m file.

Thanks to this old discussion, I’ve discovered that the default C Language Dialect in Release build for XCode – C99 – doesn’t support asm blocks. I changed the language dialect to GNU99 and all is well!

Now curiously, the debug configuration is also set to C99, but I’m guessing that the magic of gdb is making things available that perhaps ought not be available.

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Data Collected!

17May09

Pendulum Sync will now collect apps, data and preferences for the user’s chosen applications. It’s now just a matter of hooking up the networking component (already written, based on the picture sharing example) and sending the data over to my share buddy! After that, I just need to storyboard the UI and I think ladies and gentlemen we’ll have an Alpha release… after which time the work really begins!

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Computers Tab

10May09

Added datasource methods to the singleton CQInfo class. It now returns all the appropriate information about this computer including the user’s login photo plus the computer image. That means that I can show the information as a little scrollable table view, much more resize friendly than the initial ideas. This is the little data packet that will be sent to interested Peers.

Now working on CQFilesystem to parse the applications into a filelist.

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