This is just a quick post about Caffeinated. Some of you may have been following @caffeinatedapp for a long time now, since is started off and are curious to why its taking so long to get something into your hands. Firstly, some of you regard to “us” as “team”, when in-fact there is only one of me :D. Due to being a Web Developer as a job, I only get my evenings / weekends to actually develop the app, this can prove difficult at times due to staring at a screen all day then coming home and the last thing I want to do is continue staring at another screen. Im also a hardcore gamer, so it works around me caining games aswell.

Caffeinated is coming along at a steady pace, I will not rush it to get it into your hands faster, I just want it to be the most beautiful RSS reader there is with a community behind it with plugins and themes, but as you know it takes time. Bare with me guys / girls, im sure it will be worth the wait ;)

Curtis

I thought I would do a quick post on how I achieved the “overlaying” NSOutlineView effect within Caffeinated.

Im not going to provide source, meerly the thought process behind it. So here it goes.

Its made up of 2 NSOutlineViews, one embedded within the others NSScrollView. The main NSOutlineView has a custom cell at the top of it which is the same height as the overlaying NSOutlineView. Due to the fact the overlaying NSOutlineView is wrapped within a NSScrollView, you must subclass its scrollview to forward the scrolling events on to its superview – superview, so 2 levels up the display list. Another problem will occur when the main NSScrollView redisplays the main NSOutlineView, this will cause the cells within the main NSOutlineView to draw over the top of the overlaying NSOutlineView. To get around this problem we observe the main NSScrollView for its scrolling notification and redraw the overlaying NSOutlineView when it has been posted.

Another thing you will notice is the shadow and the indent lines. This is meerly produced by subclassing the NSOutlineView class and overriding its drawRect methods and drawing the indent lines. How the shadow works is just by drawing an image below the overlaying NSOutlineView, with custom methods in the delegate, you can easily turn the shadow on and off.

Next part is overriding the keyboard events within the NSOutlineView, so that both of the views act as one when reaching the first and last item within them and selecting the appropriate view. Its actually pretty simple once you get your head around the concept. It does require you to type a fair bit of code, but its worth it ;)

Hope this helps anyone.

The problem is, Internet Explorer ( bless its cotton socks ) doesn’t like you loading the same swf file into the document dynamically over and over again. It will meerly use a cached file, so whatever you inject into the Flash movie when its loaded is stored and IE will constantly use this movie until you close the browser.

The solution? Very simple…meery wack a timestamp on the end of the file you wish to include…like this :

'mymovie.swf?time=' + new Date().getTime();

Thus Internet Explorer will think its a completely new file and load that bad boy in again!

Once again IE has made me spend endless hours on pointless bulls**t.

Its been a hell of along time since I posted anything on this blog. I wanted to post something a few days back and really hated the look and feel of the site…so I totally went and did it, I totally scrapped the other one and thus this new site was born. Although it says development blog at the top, this site will consist of geeky tutorials aswell, from the depths of the languages such as COCOA, ActionScript, JavaScript, PHP and anything else that seems to crop into my head. I plan on putting a tutorial on this site every week, or really anything thats rather geeky that I stumble across or have the urge to tell people about.