Author: mike (Page 9 of 26)

What is dewpoint?

February 22, 2007 / mike / 0 Comments

I just posted a new weather article over on the Gaucho Software Forums this morning. The article talks about what dewpoint is and how we can measure it. This is one I’ve been meaning to write for quite awhile now and I finally got a chance to spend some time on it.

If you have any comments on the article, feel free to post them on that forum topic. I have a few ideas for future articles but I want to make sure I don’t run out of topics. If you have any suggestions of topics I should cover, get in touch with me.

Removing preferences belonging to your app…

February 13, 2007 / mike / 0 Comments

I was working on some code to uninstall an application, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Cocoa’s NSUserDefaults class will remove the application’s preferences file from ~/Library/Preferences if you remove all the keys:

NSUserDefaults *defaults = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
NSArray *keys = [[defaults dictionaryRepresentation] allKeys];

int i, count = [keys count];
for (i = 0; i < count; i++) {
   [defaults removeObjectForKey:[keys objectAtIndex:i]];
}

[defaults synchronize];

It’s not often you find uninstall options for OS X applications, but it’s nice Apple’s engineers thought about this case and handle it appropriately.

The Cult of Seasonality

February 12, 2007 / mike / 0 Comments

I’d like to send a big thanks out to Scott McGrath for his awesome review of Seasonality on the Maccast…

Seasonality is a gorgeous OS X application, a distinctive Cocoa app that makes people stop, look and ask questions when they walk by a display showing its exotic weather maps, satellite imagery, forecast data, and charts of recent weather in your region.

MacSanta

December 20, 2006 / mike / 1 Comment

In the spirit of the Holidays, some developers are getting together and offering 20% discount coupons on their software. If you have been considering the purchase of Seasonality, there’s never been a better time to buy. Just use the coupon code “MACSANTA” when checking out of the Gaucho Software Store, and get 20% off the purchase of Seasonality.

Thanks go out to the Rogue Amoeba crew for putting this together.

Northwest Storm

December 15, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

James Duncan Davidson writes:

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we’re prepping for a big storm that’s set to rip through tonight. Hurricane force winds are forecast on the coast, blizzard conditions are forecast for the Cascades, and it looks like we’re going to get rattled about here in Portland. Already, the winds are gusting about and hitting 40mph.

I just caught wind (no pun intended) of this storm earlier this afternoon. There are storm warnings covering the entire coastline of Washington and Oregon, and even part of Northern California, this is definitely going to be a big one. I even saw a High Surf Warning with estimated swell heights of 38-42 feet. If you’re in that area, hunker down and stay safe.

Seasonality 1.4

December 14, 2006 / mike / 1 Comment

I released Seasonality 1.4 out into the wild this morning. So far the release is going pretty nicely, without any major bugs found as of yet. I’ve been using the beta for the past few months without finding any major issues, so I kind of expected this to be a pretty stable release. The forecast server here has dished out over 700,000 forecasts up through yesterday (that’s without a final Seasonality release hitting it). I’m interested to see how long it will take to hit a million with this official release of version 1.4. Thanks go out to everyone who helped beta test this release.

Also, with the risk of writing about out-of-date news, I’ve posted a couple of weather articles over on the Gaucho Software Forums. First is an explanation for the fairly quiet Atlantic hurricane season this past year. I talk about some of the ingredients needed to form a hurricane, and what has been missing this year. The second article, posted last week, explains why why relative humidity is a bad measure of moisture in the atmosphere. If you’re interested in either of those topics, be sure to check out these articles. As a side note, I am patiently waiting for the next release of YaBB Forum software, which has RSS support so users will be able to subscribe to these weather articles I post. They have a feature-lock on the release, but no word yet on an expected release date.

Disk Image Details

December 12, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

Expectations are high when you release a piece of software for Mac OS X. Every part of the interface has to be top-notch, even the disk image which may only reside on the user’s computer for a time period of a few minutes while they install your app.

For Seasonality 1.4 I decided it was time to refresh the look of the disk image a bit. I had a custom background image previously, but it looked a lot like the Gaucho Software website, and I didn’t think that branding was appropriate for the DMG. A few months ago I came across a blog posting over at Software Trenches with some good comments regarding different DMG designs. There are some very nice background images displayed there, but the one that stood out to me was that of Adium. It was clean, easy to read, and matched the style of OS X pretty well. I decided to base the new Seasonality DMG off of that type of design. Here is what I came up with…

At the top I have the standard Gaucho Software text and logo, complete with drop shadows where appropriate. The background has some very faint pin-striping, just to add a bit of texture and depth. It’s also a tribute to older versions of Mac OS X. Below that you see a highlighted box, which draws the user’s attention to the immediate action that needs to be performed to install Seasonality. I spent some time working on the arrow, and decided to match it’s look with the text above. Finally, at the bottom you have a couple of supporting documents.

One nice thing about this DMG design is the icon spacing. It’s setup so the icons are at the default grid spacing of Mac OS X, so this will save me the trouble of lining up the icons exactly every time I create a DMG.

An aspect of a DMG archive that is commonly overlooked is the disk image icon. A lot of apps use the standard disk image icon. A small subset of apps will go one step further and place their application’s icon on top of the standard disk image, to make that particular DMG stand out more. What most developers overlook is keeping the 3 dimensional aspect in check. Just pasting the application icon on top of the disk image icon will result in the app icon that does not match the 3D perspective on the disk image. To fix this, I make a couple of Skew adjustments in Photoshop, and the disk image icon below shows the completed results. This makes the icon more believable and adds that final touch.

Gauchos Win NCAA Soccer Championship

December 8, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

Go Gauchos! The UCSB Mens Soccer team just took the NCAA title this past Sunday. But how can some enthusiastic UCSB students celebrate such a victory? I know, let’s throw one of the stadium goal posts into the ocean! 🙂

Of course someone was able to catch the event on video and post it to YouTube…

Ole!

Midwest Snow Storm

November 30, 2006 / mike / 1 Comment

If you live in the Midwest, either you are getting hit with this storm right now or you will be getting hit with it soon. This storm has the potential to be the first big snow for the year in many areas. The forecast models have been all over the board with predicting this event. At least, that was the case up until earlier today when the 0Z and 12Z runs of the GFS and NAM, along with some other models are now much more agreeable with this storm’s track. When the models line up, that’s a pretty good sign of an accurate path.

The image below shows the precipitation forecast for Friday between 12 and 18Z (7am – 1pm EST). Right now, this system is starting to form in Texas. The storm will be traveling NNE over the next 36 hours to around Ohio in the time period of the image below. The precipitation “arrow” is pretty much pointing in the direction this thing is moving. The lightest blue is between 0.75 and 1 inch of liquid equivalent precipitation… However, if you follow the deep blue line marked 0 degrees C, all of this area will be getting either a rain/snow mix or all snow. 1 inch of liquid precipitation can equate to anywhere between 6-10 inches of snow depending on the temperature. Since this image just shows the precipitation for a 6 hour time period (and not the entire storm’s precipitation), there is a real potential of a bunch of snow being dumped along it’s path. Some models have forecasted up to 17 inches here in central Michigan, but I think that’s really overshooting it. I’m guessing it will drop around 6-8 inches of heavy snow for our area, and definitely more in some other areas.

Anyway, here’s hoping we’ll get enough snow to go sledding this weekend. 🙂

Mac360 Reviews Seasonality

November 6, 2006 / mike / 0 Comments

I’m a bit behind on this one, but a few weeks ago Jack Miller over at Mac360 reviewed Seasonality…

It’s one thing to know if it’s sunny or cloudy, cool or cold, warm or hot. Many Mac utilities give you quick access to the weather.

Seasonality becomes your weather center. It does everything but control the weather.