Lion in the House

Today, Apple released a preview version of Mac OS X Lion, but only for registered Mac developers. This is a big release, not just in terms of front-end experience, but also under the hood. A lot of the changes are influenced by UIKit and iOS, hence the moniker "Back to the Mac", but there's also a fair amount of completely new goodness, some of which will likely roll down to iOS at some point.

If you're an iOS developer, but not a Mac developer, it's probably worth $99 to get access to Tiger Lion. It'll give you a better idea of where Apple is taking things.

Plus, there's just a lot of really cool stuff in there.

Interestingly, the OS preview is being delivered via the Mac App Store, which might be a hint at how paid OS upgrades will be handled in the future.

Members of the Mac developer program can log into the Mac Developer site to download Lion, the release notes, and a new version of Xcode 4.

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Posted in: Apple,Mac OS X

More Desktop Code

Although my focus for the last 20 months has been the iPhone, I've tried to stay at least in touch with Cocoa for the Mac. As a result, I tend to start a lot of small projects designed to help me learn, re-learn, or brush up on some specific area of functionality. A lot of these projects just end up gathering dust on my hard drive and are never used in any kind of production application, so since I'm doing a little housecleaning, I thought I'd post some of these projects that might be useful to iPhone developers wanting to get into Mac development or for newer Mac developers.

I've written several Cocoa applications over the years that work with Quicktime, including Crimson FX, a simple rotoscoping and special effects application. Back when I wrote these, most of the Quicktime functionality had to be accessed through Carbon calls. Since then, there have been several major releases of Quicktime, and Cocoa has gained some very robust Quicktime support by way of QTKit.

To familiarize myself with Cocoa's current Quicktime functionality, I wrote a small application that loads in a Quicktime movie and allows you to step through it frame-by-frame or to scrub through the frames using a slider. There's also a custom view that displays a filmstrip timeline, similar to the way iMovie displays a timeline.



This is neither a full-featured, nor a production-ready application, but if you're interested in writing a Cocoa application that needs to do more with Quicktime than simply play a movie, you may find some of the code in here useful. In addition to the filmstrip view, there's also a category that adds several methods to QTMovie for dealing with the individual frames of a movie's video track.

You can find the project here. As always, there are no restrictions on the use of this code, and I welcome any improvements or bug fixes you might come up with.

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Posted in: Cocoa,Mac OS X,Quicktime

Some Desktop GL Goodies

No time for a tutorial or lengthy description, but I thought I'd quickly post a few Xcode projects I've got.

First is the OpenGL ES icosahedron project from way back in OpenGL ES from the Ground Up, Part 2, only ported to Cocoa for the Mac. This is the very first one, with no lighting. It does show how to set up OpenGL ES on the desktop, including toggling full-screen mode. You can also use the arrow keys to increase or decrease the rotation speed.

Second, I've taken Apple's very old NSOpenGLView Full Screen sample code, and updated it to use the modern approach that works nicely with multiple displays and multiple GPUs. You can find the updated Xcode project here.

Third, here's another version of NSOpenGLView Full Screen sample code that creates a dedicated full screen app that doesn't support a windowed mode.

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Posted in: Mac OS X,OpenGL. Cocoa