Tag Archives: Apple

Is my vision that bad? No, it’s just a bug in Apple’s Calculator.

While programming on my Mac and converting decimal numbers to hex and binary and using Apple’s Calculator for it – because it is built-in and works decent – I thought, I saw some wobbly lines of numbers.

My first thought was: my eyes are getting tired. But it looked annoyingly wobbly and there went my focus on the task. I had to investigate, what was going on. I took a screenshot. Can you see it in the image above?

Let me highlight the annoying detail in the image below.

Maybe you are reading this on a tiny screen, or your eyes are tired, but also… I had to see it for myself. Here is a zoomed in version below:

Yes, indeed! Some digits in the binary display section are off by one pixel. Nice anti-aliased rendering by the way, but still, why are some digits misplaced by a pixel?

How did this happen? I should add, the calculator app has been open for many days. Maybe the UI coordinate system is using floats and a rounding error aggregated over many days… I’d love to find out, but I guess I won’t. Anyways, at least my vision is not that bad.

I would contact Apple, if there was a feedback option, but there isn’t, so I won’t. Instead I’ll just share the bug on the Internet. Enjoy!

How-to allow Mac OS X’s Gatekeeper to run an unsigned application

Apple Scholarship for WWDC 2012

iChem

iChem is a case study to bring aquatic chemistry calculations on the iPhone to the classroom. The computational nature of aquatic chemistry lends itself well to the iPhone platform and by providing students with a simple means of performing laborious calculations, the underlying chemistry of the problem being studied can be the primary focus rather than the calculations.

The application features Activity Coefficient, Ionization Fraction and Equilibrium Constant computations. The goal is to provide a user friendly tool for chemistry students, which enables them to quickly solve standard computations on their fingertips. The tool will be made available to the public, soon.

iChem Screenshots

[1] Martin Wojtczyk, Mark A. Nanny, and Chetan T. Goudar. Aquatic Chemistry on the iPhone: Activity Coefficient, Ionization Fraction and Equilibrium Constant determination. In 239th American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition, San Francisco, USA, March 2010.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server Tour, San Jose

The official product link of Mac OS X Server: http://www.apple.com/server/

My favourite presentation during this event was “Sal on Automation” with system wide services. His website contains very valuable resources on automation Tasks with Mac OS X. Check out:
http://www.macosxautomation.com and
http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/index.html

Sync your Motorola C390 with iSync for free

Recently my SonyEricsson cellphone broke and I wanted to replace it by my Bluetooth enabled Motorola C390. Apple’s iSync is really great to keep your address book and calendar in sync with your cellphone. Unfortunately the C390 is not supported by default. Your Mac can pair with the phone and use it for data connections but iSync does not support it, see [1].

There seem to be some commercial solutions which may help, though I didn’t test one of them, just search the web for iSync and C390 and you will find them.

Luckily I also found this guy’s Howto in a forum about adding Motorola C390 support to iSync for free just by modifying a xml file [2]. However, since I am running Mac OS X 10.4.9, I recognized slight changes in the xml tag names. That’s why I noted the instructions below.

Enabling Motorola C390 for iSync

Right click on the iSync Application
Show Package Contents
Goto Contents/Plugins/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/ Plugins/PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/ Resources
Backup and modify the MetaClasses.plist file to make it look like below in the beginning

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>com.motorola.C390</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Identification</key>
        <dict>
            <key>com.apple.gmi+gmm</key>
            <string>"Motorola CE, Copyright 2000"+C390</string>
        </dict>
        <key>InheritsFrom</key>
        <array>
            <string>com.motorola.usb-bt.0x22B8/0x4902</string>
        </array>
            <key>Services</key>
        <array>
            <dict>
                <key>ServiceName</key>
                <string>com.apple.model</string>
                <key>ServiceProperties</key>
                <dict>
                    <key>ModelIcon</key>
                    <string>MOTC390.tiff</string>
                    <key>ModelName</key>
                    <string>C390</string>
                </dict>
            </dict>
        </array>
    </dict>
</dict>

You will need a tiff file, with the name you entered under ModelIcon, but you can just copy it from another one in the same folder as the MetaClasses.plist file
Start iSync
Select Devices->Add Device from the menu
et voilà, your Motorola C390 should show up as a supported phone

I synced my address book and calendar successfully with it, so I don’t know, why the phone is not supported by default. Anyways, use at your own risk.

Wiimote controls Front Row on a PowerBook

I have this 2005 12″ PowerBook G4 with Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.9 and was jealous of the new MacBooks’ Remote Controls. One day I found a movie on youtube about someone controlling Front Row with a Wiimote. I just didn’t find all the links in one place. Maybe this is of help for you. It should work on other Bluetooth enabled Macintosh computers as well.

1. Get Front Row to work on a Mac without Remote Control

Download the Front Row application from Apple
Enable Front Row on your Mac through Andrew Escobars Enabler

2. Install DarwiinRemote

Get DarwiinRemote
The key mapping matches the one of Front Row by default, though, you might want to change the Wiimote’s + and – buttons to change volume control as well

Works like a charme.

You can also use the Wiimote with DarwiinRemote to go through your PowerPoint Presentations 🙂

xerces-c-src_2_6_0 on Mac OS X Tiger

Issue

When I tried to compile Xerces-C++ Version 2.6.0 from source on Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.2 with gcc-4.0.0 the compiler complained:

MacOSUnicodeConverter.cpp:78: error: 'static' may not be used when defining 
(as opposed to declaring) a static data member
MacOSUnicodeConverter.cpp:84: error: 'static' may not be used when defining 
(as opposed to declaring) a static data member
make[2]: *** [MacOSUnicodeConverter.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [transcoders] Error 2
make: *** [Util] Error 2

Solution

The solution is easy, just delete the word static in the source code manually and build again or use this patch:

xerces-c-src_2_6_0-tiger.diff

Patch instructions

Download the Xerces-C++ source distribution from [1].

The sources contained in my case version 2.6.0.

Extract sources and apply patch:

tar xzf xerces-c-current.tar.gz
cd xerces-c-src_2_6_0
patch -p1 <../xerces-c-src_2_6_0-tiger.diff

Please make sure that the paths are adjusted to your system. Follow the official build instructions Building Xerces-C++ from the Mac OS X command line at [2] afterwards.

Qt-mac-free-3.3.4 on Mac OS X Tiger

Hint

If you don’t need specifically qt-mac-free-3.3.4 but any 3.3.x would do it, you might want to check out Trolltech’s recently published Version 3.3.5. If you ever wondered – like me – where you can still download the 3.3.x branch have a look at

ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/source/

It seems that you can’t find any more download links for 3.3.x at Trolltech’s webpage.

Issue

When I tried to compile Qt for Mac 3.3.4 from source on Max OS X Tiger 10.4.2 with gcc-4.0.0 the compiler complained:

kernel/qaccessible_mac.cpp:189: error: non-local variable 
'<anonymous struct> text_bindings [][10]' uses anonymous 
type
make[2]: *** [.obj/release-shared/qaccessible_mac.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [sub-src] Error 2
make: *** [init] Error 2

and

network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp: In function `int qt_socket_accept(int, 
sockaddr*, int*)':
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:47: error: invalid conversion from 'int*' to 
'socklen_t*'
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:47: error:   initializing argument 3 of 'int 
accept(int, sockaddr*, socklen_t*)'
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp: In member function `QSocketDevice::Protocol 
QSocketDevice::getProtocol() const':
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:132: error: invalid conversion from 'int*' 
to 'socklen_t*'
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:132: error:   initializing argument 3 of 
'int getsockname(int, sockaddr*, socklen_t*)'
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp: In member function `int 
QSocketDevice::option(QSocketDevice::Option) const':
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:324: error: invalid conversion from 'int*' 
to 'socklen_t*'
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:324: error:   initializing argument 5 of 'int 
getsockopt(int, int, int, void*, socklen_t*)'
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp: In member function `virtual Q_LONG 
QSocketDevice::readBlock(char*, Q_ULONG)':
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:784: error: invalid conversion from 'int*' 
to 'socklen_t*'
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:784: error:   initializing argument 6 of 
'ssize_t recvfrom(int, void*, size_t, int, sockaddr*, socklen_t*)
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp: In member function `void 
QSocketDevice::fetchConnectionParameters()':
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:1053: error: invalid conversion from 'int*' 
to 'socklen_t*'
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:1053: error:   initializing argument 3 of 
'int getsockname(int, sockaddr*, socklen_t*)'
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:1057: error: invalid conversion from 'int*' 
to 'socklen_t*'
network/qsocketdevice_unix.cpp:1057: error:   initializing argument 3 of 
'int getpeername(int, sockaddr*, socklen_t*)'
make[2]: *** [.obj/release-shared/qsocketdevice_unix.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [sub-src] Error 2
make: *** [init] Error 2

Additionally with both compilers gcc 4.0 and gcc 3.3 linking an application against qt-mac-free-3.3.4 resulted in warning messages like the following, because Mac OS X Tiger comes with additional dynamic library handling functions which now conflict with qt:

/usr/bin/ld: warning multiple definitions of symbol _dlsym
/usr/lib/gcc/powerpc-apple-darwin8/4.0.0/../../../libpthread.dylib
(dyldAPIsInLibSystem.o) definition of _dlsym
/usr/local/lib/libqt-mt.dylib(dlfcn.o) definition of _dlsym
/usr/bin/ld: warning multiple definitions of symbol _dladdr
/usr/lib/gcc/powerpc-apple-darwin8/4.0.0/../../../libpthread.dylib
(dyldAPIsInLibSystem.o) definition of _dladdr
/usr/local/lib/libqt-mt.dylib(dlfcn.o) definition of _dladdr
/usr/bin/ld: warning multiple definitions of symbol _dlclose
/usr/lib/gcc/powerpc-apple-darwin8/4.0.0/../../../libpthread.dylib
(dyldAPIsInLibSystem.o) definition of _dlclose
/usr/local/lib/libqt-mt.dylib(dlfcn.o) definition of _dlclose
/usr/bin/ld: warning multiple definitions of symbol _dlerror
/usr/lib/gcc/powerpc-apple-darwin8/4.0.0/../../../libpthread.dylib
(dyldAPIsInLibSystem.o) definition of _dlerror
/usr/local/lib/libqt-mt.dylib(dlfcn.o) definition of _dlerror
/usr/bin/ld: warning multiple definitions of symbol _dlopen
/usr/lib/gcc/powerpc-apple-darwin8/4.0.0/../../../libpthread.dylib
(dyldAPIsInLibSystem.o) definition of _dlopen
/usr/local/lib/libqt-mt.dylib(dlfcn.o) definition of _dlopen
/usr/bin/ld: warning suggest use of -bind_at_load, as lazy binding 
may result in errors or different symbols being used
symbol _dladdr used from dynamic library /usr/lib/gcc/
powerpc-apple-darwin8/4.0.0/../../../libpthread.dylib
(dyldAPIsInLibSystem.o) not from earlier dynamic library 
libqt-mt.3.dylib(dlfcn.o)
symbol _dlclose used from dynamic library /usr/lib/gcc/
powerpc-apple-darwin8/4.0.0/../../../libpthread.dylib
(dyldAPIsInLibSystem.o) not from earlier dynamic library 
libqt-mt.3.dylib(dlfcn.o)
symbol _dlerror used from dynamic library /usr/lib/gcc/
powerpc-apple-darwin8/4.0.0/../../../libpthread.dylib
(dyldAPIsInLibSystem.o) not from earlier dynamic library 
libqt-mt.3.dylib(dlfcn.o)
symbol _dlopen used from dynamic library /usr/lib/gcc/
powerpc-apple-darwin8/4.0.0/../../../libpthread.dylib
(dyldAPIsInLibSystem.o) not from earlier dynamic library 
libqt-mt.3.dylib(dlfcn.o)
symbol _dlsym used from dynamic library /usr/lib/gcc/
powerpc-apple-darwin8/4.0.0/../../../libpthread.dylib
(dyldAPIsInLibSystem.o) not from earlier dynamic library 
libqt-mt.3.dylib(dlfcn.o)

Solution

Apply the following patch:

qt-mac-free-3.3.4-tiger.diff

Patch instructions

Extract sources and apply patch:

tar xjf qt-mac-free-3.3.4.tar.bz2
cd qt-mac-free-3.3.4
patch -p1 <../qt-mac-free-3.3.4-tiger.diff

Please make sure that the paths are adjusted to your system. Follow the official build instructions afterwards. After applying the little patch qt-mac-free-3.3.4 and applications linked to it should build fine with gcc 4.0 and gcc 3.3.

References

My patch is based on the following Articles: