Atlassian had its 3rd FedEx Day today, so Jens and I tried to tackle CONF-1837 and implement an offline client for Confluence. I've been meaning to try out Core Data for a long time, so this was a perfect opportunity (cross-platform issues aside).
I have to say that Core Data is just amazing! We were able to recreate all of the objects required to store Confluence Spaces and Pages using Xcode's data modelling functionality (including referential integrity – weeeee!). What blew me away was that we did not have to write any model, controller or view code to get the interface working:
The only code written for the entire app (please ignore its temporary ugliness) was to retrieve the Spaces and Pages via XML-RPC and pass them onto Core Data. Yep – that entire interface was displayed without writing any code! It's one thing to see it in a tutorial, but a totally different experience to make a 'useful' app.
and now… for the bad part. Jens and I spent half of the day futzing with Apple's WebServices framework to get Page retrieval working. The WebServices framework appears to be a black hole in Apple's Documentation. There's little information on the methods for making SOAP/XML-RPC calls in a Cocoa application, let alone code examples of how to do it!
Published on
May 30, 2006 in
Apple.
While I've largely been quite happy with my MacBook Pro, recently some pesky little gremlins have started to appear (and old ones have persisted):
- If the machine runs out of battery, it shuts off completely, rather than going to sleep (let alone a deep sleep)
- Over the weekend, the laptop spontaneously lost a large chunk of its battery charge in a second (and shut off – see above). Apparently this is a known problem with certain early model batteries (Forum thread)
- … and it keeps on whining when not on full brightness (or when the screen dims)
I gave Apple Support a call tonight, reported the serial number and problem, and the guy refused to acknowledge the problem over the phone, instead telling me to take the computer to an Apple Service Provider and get them to diagnose and fix it. FFS! Apple KNOWS it's a problem, and even has a list of serial numbers affected by (potentially) defective batteries. Ship me a replacement battery, already! I don't have time to hand my computer over to a repair shop and lose it for a week, when my thesis proposal is due in just over that.
Published on
April 6, 2006 in
Apple.
So now you can boot Windows XP on the Mac, officially.
I bet those in the know at Apple were having a good chuckle when all those people were hacking around to get it working only three weeks ago! 
