Ramblings of a Programmer

Being a new Mac user, I only thought there were the Shift-Cmd-3 and Shift-Cmd-4 options for getting screen or window shots. I have found this page at X vs XP which details other shortcut keys for screen shots.

iPodderX 3.0.1 has now been released. There has been a lot of interesting threads about the 3.0 version on the forums. Hopefully this version fixes a lot of the issues that people have been seeing with it.

God took one of his children home tonight. My father's sister, Lillian Parker, was taken to be with God tonight. She had a really bad heart attack Saturday and was put in the hospital.

My parents went to see her earlier today. My mother said that she looked quite bad with only about 20% functionality in her heart. My father called just a little while ago to give me the news and said that he knew it was just a matter of time earlier today, because she seemed to be just holding on… just like her mother did so many years ago when I was young.

My aunt was a life long member of Harmony Baptist Church in a small, unincorporated area of Blount county in Alabama. She always laughed and smiled when I saw her. Her laugh was always infectious. She was definitely a special lady.

Please pray for my family in this time of mourning, but please do not shed a tear, for she is in no longer suffering and she is much happier than we could ever be, because she is laughing and singing with her mother, Jesus, and having a wonderful fellowship with God, The Father!

God took one of his children home tonight. My father’s sister, Lillian Parker, was taken to be with God tonight. She had a really bad heart attack Saturday and was put in the hospital.

My parents went to see her earlier today. My mother said that she looked quite bad with only about 20% functionality in her heart. My father called just a little while ago to give me the news and said that he knew it was just a matter of time earlier today, because she seemed to be just holding on… just like her mother did so many years ago when I was young.

My aunt was a life long member of Harmony Baptist Church in a small, unincorporated area of Blount county in Alabama. She always laughed and smiled when I saw her. Her laugh was always infectious. She was definitely a special lady.

Please pray for my family in this time of mourning, but please do not shed a tear, for she is in no longer suffering and she is much happier than we could ever be, because she is laughing and singing with her mother, Jesus, and having a wonderful fellowship with God, The Father!

I found a neat little trick by accident tonight when I was looking for new desktop pictures. I was going after Ctrl-Option-D to pop up the context menu with the optional Save As… available for an image. I hit Option-Cmd-D by mistake and found that this key combination hides the Dock. This was a new one on me!

I am looking forward to the update for iTunes which will include support for podcast downloads. This should be very interesting, because it will bring podcasting to a wider audience, in my opinion. If Apple has a pretty good podcast directory, this could be a very good thing. Currently, reports are that it is several weeks ahead of schedule and may be released as early as the end of June or the first week of July.

As for OS X 10.4.2, apparently, the last build was seeded a few days ago. Rumors were that it might be released yesterday, but it still has not been seen. Hopefully it will be out this weekend.

I recently started playing around with C++, partly because I wanted to work with a cross-platform language other than Java that I could use on my Windows based laptop and my PowerPC Mac. I have been a developer for 16+ years, but working with C++ has me feeling like I am a new programmer again.

I have been struggling with virtual methods, abstract classes, and templates. I am currently stuck on a situation where I have a pure abstract class defined that I want to use in a collection to represent one of three different derived classes, but I seem to be getting some compile errors where I use it.

At least I am not getting paid like a new developer again.  I would go hungry.

I came across this small utility by accident tonight when playing around with a widget on my Dashboard. It is called R2ToDo. Here is the description from the author's web site:

R2ToDo is a dashboard widget for Mac OSX Tiger. It communicates with iCal to display any incomplete ToDo items from any of your iCal calendars. Clicking on any ToDo item will open iCal with the complete ToDo item details. R2ToDo even shows your tasks in the color of their corresponding iCal calendars!

Check out this and other utilities at BestBits.

I came across the Universal Binaries site tonight while reading posts on the AppleInsider Forums. One of the forum members put together this site to keep track of all of the applications that are currently compiled as universal binaries and will run on the PPC or Intel based Mac platform.

The list is small now, but it will start growing fast.

I found this interesting tidbit of information tonight when reading through my RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. One thing that I might add, is when you are using switching between applications using Cmd-Tab, if you use Cmd-Tilde, it goes the opposite direction in that window. If you use Cmd-Tilde without having used Cmd-Tab first, of course, then you cycle through all open windows for the application that was in front when you first hit the key combination.

Anyway… on to the information…

Cycle through all open windows via the keyboard: “Instead of using Cmd-Tilde to cycle through only one application's windows, you can press Control-F4 to cycle through the open windows in all the open applications. To go backwards through the windows, just hold down the Shi…”

(Via macosxhints.)