a glob of nerdishness

If you follow the Apple news/rumor sites, you’ll have heard that Apple has been (pre-)releasing software like crazy lately. I can neither confirm nor deny these rumors. Between my marginal ISP and the dank, dusty cellars underneath Apple’s public website, I get plenty of half-finished large downloads regardless of what Apple is up to.

When Safari thinks it’s finished downloading an incomplete file, I like to use curl to finish. My usual trick isn’t enough for the Apple Developer Connection’s password-protected files, and it took me a while to figure those out. Eventually, with the help of two helpful posts and some trial-and-error, this is the method I’ve settled on:

1. Copy partially downloaded file if it’s fairly large (because sometimes I mess up)
2. Log into ADC in a browser, and copy the download link
3. curl -c $(mktemp -t curl) -L -o '<Partially Downloaded File>' -C - '<Download URL>'

It is very important to quote the Download URL, because it may contain special shell characters! This is the main reason I copy the partial download; I don’t want to blow away a large partial download with a bit of error page HTML.

This works as follows: -c $(mktemp -t curl) tells curl to keep track of cookies in a temporary file, and -L means to follow redirects. The downloaded output file is specified via -o and -C - means to continue at the offset where this output file stops. I don’t include an option to automatically retry on failure, because if the session expires this could lead to a loss of the newly appended data if the download is replaced by an error page.

Recently the topic of selections in Cocoa apps came up again. While most of the discussion has centered around selections in text, the majority of sane developers use AppKit’s built-in text views and leave it at that. However, when we were developing Mercatalog’s interface over at Calf Trail, we needed to handle mouse selection and dragging of photo icons in a consistent way. Not only did our map and timeline layers need to behave similarly, they had to work like the rest of the operating system.

Cocoa leaves selection handling completely up to each individual view. As our view code developed, we realized that this task was less trivial than it first seemed. Playing around with various views in other apps to determine the “correct” behaviour was even less encouraging — there are many selection idiosyncrasies among Apple’s applications and views.

So we tried to solve the problem once and for all, in a separate class intended to manage selection and drag source behaviour for any view/cell/layer that needs it. It’s mostly geared towards mouse selection at this point, but Calf Trail is making it available as open source in the hopes it will spark discussion and progress towards good selection behaviour. You can find details and source for TLSelectionManager on Google Code.