On March 8, 2008 the Cocoa Dev House Munich will take place at equinux AG in Munich. There are already nearly 30 attendees on the list and I hope that I can write my name on that list soon, too.
Author Archive for Simon
Implementing syntax highlighting can be a painful task. Lots of regular expressions and thinking may be required to master this.
On the search for an easy way to implement a syntax highlighting mechanism for NSTextView I found an easy and fast (regarding runtime) way to do this. By using flex (a tool with its roots in the 1970’s) defining the rules of what should be highlighted makes it a lot more easier and structured.
flex is the GNU version of lex, the lexical analyzer generator (Buzzword jackpot!) developed by Eric Schmidt and Mike Lesk in 1975. By defining some rules (mainly regular expressions) it generates a C program which allows us to scan through a text and do something with the text, e.g. divide it into tokens. Tokens are chunks of characters with a special meaning (as defined in our rules). Confused? Read on, this concept will become very clear soon.
In this article I want to show you how we can use this ancient but very powerful tool to implement a basic syntax highlighting within a NSTextView.
Continue reading ‘Syntax Highlighting for NSTextView with flex’
Yes, we all know this. Don’t trust beta software. But if you do, make backups!! Well, making backups is no bad idea, anyway.
Sorry folks, but an update of ecto killed the article I was writing. Thanks to Time Machine I could restore the article but the work of two days is lost. 
I found a nice little video (45 min) at YouTube showing David Allen giving a speech about Getting Things Done at Google. If you already know GTD you won’t find anything new, but it gives a nice overview what GTD is and why it may help you getting more productive and relaxed.
I’ve been using GTD for a couple of months now, and I can tell you that it works. But it only works if you have the discipline to use it for all of your stuff. As soon as you start disregarding the usage of your trusted system the whole system may get out of control.
Also, today OmniFocus 1.0 (a GTD trusted system) was released. With over 13,000 pre-orders this is a huge success for the guys at the Omni Group. Congratulations! It’s a really great product!
It has been a few weeks since I last wrote an article. I’ve been busy the last time and I will be for the next four weeks. But right before 2007 ends I found a few minutes to change the design of this website. Also, the next article is “in production” and will be posted the next days.
As you might know the PostgreSQL Global Development Group is currently working on the final version of the PostgreSQL Database Management System (DBMS) 8.3 which has some nice features. Unfortunately, there is no prebuilt package available for Mac OS X of the current beta versions. But fortunately building PostgreSQL is very easy on Leopard:
If you plan to use Adobe Creative Suite 3 on Mac OS X Leopard make sure that the filesystem Creative Suite is installed on is Mac OS Extended (Journaling), and NOT Mac OS Extendend (case-sensitive, Journaling).
Otherwise, the Creative Suite installer ends with an error message which says that the filesystem is not supported, argh.
Today, Steve Jobs announced a native SDK for their mobile OS X devices (iPhone and iPod touch).
This SDK allows third-party developers to create their own applications running natively on the iPhone and iPod touch.
Apple plans “to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February”. Well, that sounds very interesting. 
Today, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group released their first beta of PostgreSQL 8.3.
It has a pretty number of improvements which want to be tested. 
Technorati Tags: postgresql
Wincent Colaitua has written an interesting, worth reading blog post why functional programming could become more and more important in the future.
Note to myself: Have a deeper look at Haskell.
Technorati Tags: functional programming
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