10 Jan 2003 TheCorruptor   » (Master)

I think I mentioned earlier that I was playing with screensavers on OS X, well today I fired up Interface Builder, went through some of the nib tutorials and had a play at extending the basic screensaver I'd put up on my site.

Interface Builder is surprisingly intuitive, and in the space of 30mins I had a working configuration sheet for my screensaver, and lo, a much nicer piece of code. I particularly like the way you connect widgets to call backs and ids. Means you can concentrate on what you need to do, unlike certain other UI Builders I've used.

Apple's docs are a little sparse in places (whose aren't?), but on the whole I've managed to pick up enough ObjC to wizz through the basic bits I needed and get all the widgets working. State is saved (as it should be), but I've noticed that on the first run it's making shite up on some machines and not others. I'll fix that for 1.1 -- in a week or so. ;-)

So, Little Fluffy Cubes for OS X is available. It's just an extension of the cubes I was playing with earlier, with motion blur, blending and user configurable speeds for the movement on all axis. As I've said before. Nothing fancy, but oooo, I've got some nice ideas for other screensavers I may do later in the year.

All in all I'm very pleased with Apple's dev tools. Everything seems to be "within reach", but I it's time I sat down and learnt ObjC properly. Today's exposure to it has lessened the scare factor somewhat.

So, what's next? iTunes plugin perhaps?! ;-)

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