Programming

Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies

/ hsoi

If the title made your eyes glaze over, no need to click this link to read Ben Shneiderman’s paper on treemaps.

I’ve been buried in working with them all day today at work. Just conceptual and design at this point, haven’t started to write algorithms just yet. It’s pretty cool stuff, at least for geeks like me.

Even if you’re not, the graphical representation of treemaps can look pretty cool. I really like these circular treemaps.

Who knew examining the composition and state of your computer’s filesystem could be so trippy. 😉

of SQL and other programmer joys

/ hsoi

I know it’s been a light posting day. I’ve been buried in code.

I’m an application programmer. I tend to write most of my stuff in Objective-C and C++ (and Objective-C++ and sometimes straight C). Sometimes I do some work in Python. A few other bits of dabbling now and again.

I haven’t looked at serious database work in almost a decade.

But today I needed to consider using SQLite as a solution, so I had to pull out my SQL book and remind myself just how it all worked.

Of course by the end of the day I came to the conclusion that going straight to a relational database wasn’t going to be the best avenue to solve my problem. Instead, I think I’m going to use Core Data. I’ve used it numerous times in the past but didn’t feel it was the right fit for the work at hand (given Apple’s design intent/constraints on Core Data). But the more I thought through things, the more I think it’s going to be the way to go. At least, that’s my thinking right now. Could change tomorrow when I start prototyping.

Yeah, this probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to most of you. But I’ve been nose-down in that all day, thus minimal blogging.

Snow Leopard (almost) free

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

In my day job as a Mac software developer I’m certainly excited by the prospects offered in the upcoming Mac OS X 10.6 release codenamed “Snow Leopard“.

But that’s just the thing. I’m excited because I’m a developer and Snow Leopard offers a boatload of awesome things for developers and other under-the-hood improvements. As an end-user, I’m not really sure what benefits I see from Snow Leopard, especially in terms of enticing me to plunk down a big chunk of money to buy that OS version.

Adam Engst at TidBITS wrote an article that articulates the matter better than I ever could. I think there’s a good argument for making Snow Leopard as low-cost as possible, especially because yes a lot of people are still hanging on to Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). Anything to help get people to move along is useful.

CocoaScriptMenu

/ hsoi

My day job entails working as a software engineer writing Mac software. I just went through an ugly experience dealing with a particular 3rd party API, so it was a welcome experience to deal with a well-written bit of 3rd party code.

Jay Tuley’s CocoaScriptMenu is a terrific piece of reusable software. It does one thing: allows you to add a Scripts menu to your application, and it does it very well. I obtained the code, made a few small modifications to fit it into our build environment, dropped it into my application, and viola… it just works. Furthermore, it has just about every bit of functionality and customization that one could want. I mean, as I was thinking about how to implement this feature on my own I came up with a list of functionality, and CocoaScriptMenu satisfies every single one of them and a little bit more. Plus the licensing terms are reasonable.

Thank you, Jay Tuley, for creating this and releasing it. Good work indeed!