Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

For those of you who had some interest in the OS X clipboard software: It’s now available for download here. No fancy web page yet; I’ll make one of those when I have time. Play with it, use it, LMK if you find any bugs or missing features. I’m especially interested in improving its ability to “guess” data formats correctly – if you find a case where it guesses wrong, or it does something else suboptimal, please let me know.

For those of you who use OS X and the terminal pretty regularly: I’ve got a program that meshes the terminal in with the clipboard (providing copy and paste to files, URL’s and pipes) which is ready for beta. If any of y’all are interested, comment here or drop me an e-mail.

I did some OS X coding last night. The docs for some of the API’s in OS X include a lot of phrases like “The NSString class is ‘toll-free bridged’ to the Core Foundation Kit’s CFString class…”

Sometime late last night, that morphed in my mind into ‘troll-free bridged.’ This led to the thought of an NSTroll class, an NSTrollBridge, and so on.

I’ll just say that too much coding leads to very weird dreams.

Just finished the latest rev of the terminal clipboard utility for OS X. It now can read inputs from files and URL’s, and correctly handle text, raw data, and images. Further formats (PDF, EPS, …) to be added later. It’s starting to be pretty useful, although there’s still a minor annoyance: If your data is anything other than text or raw bits, you have to explicitly tell it so. (If you don’t and copy an image, then paste it elsewhere, it’ll paste the bits of the image as text rather than an image… this has to do with some aspects of the way OS X clipboards work. Need to play with it more to teach it to identify data types.)

If anyone feels like beta-testing it, let me know. It’s handy if you use the terminal a lot.

Update: And thanks to a random inspiration, it now can try to guess what kind of data something is, although it’s a bit slower that way. OK, this is now really in the realm of work avoidance.

Fortunately, I also got some productive work done today, like writing the outline for my oral defense…

So hansandersen and I were drinking coffee, and we got an idea for an OS X program. Since then we’ve written and debugged it, and by tomorrow PM we should have a distro ready. It provides command-line access to the clipboard: you can copy and paste, and you can stick it in the center of a pipeline, so a copy of your data gets forked to the clipboard.

It’s one of those simple little things that’s remarkably handy. (On my old NeXT there was a command-line ‘copy’ utility; somehow it disappeared in OS X…)

The fact that we could go from conception to completion in under 2 hours of work, including feature creep, is really damned neat.