I’m nearly finished the first version of my Dashboard Widget. I’m trying to think of a name for it that doesn’t infringe on something else, so I think I’ll go with Batman. I have to give a big shout out to Masanao Izumo and his BigInt code for the final touch. What I had was failing past 232-1, and that solved my problem. There’re still some layout issues, and some design decisions left to make, but about 80% of the features I wanted are there.
As I promised myself I would, I’ve begun work on a Dashboard widget that will convert values between different number bases (decimal, octal, binary, hexadecimal, etc…). I often tinker with binary files and hex editors and have found I occasionally need a way to quickly convert from decimal to hexadecimal or vice versa.
Before the turn of the century, I used to use Bitwise by Eric V. Curtis. It was $10USD shareware (which I believe I paid; My apologies if I didn’t, Eric) and was quite feature rich, but not bloated. When OS X came along, and Bitwise didn’t make the move over, I switched to PCalc, but it just didn’t “feel right,” so I never paid the shareware fee, hoping I’d eventually find a better solution. None came, and I gradually stopped tinkering with hex editors and hexadecimal conversions.
I’ve noticed in Tiger, that Apple has souped-up the Calculator, and being able to display decimal, hex, octal, binary, and even raw ASCII, is of its features. That’s close, but even then, one still has to toggle between bases to view the value. I wanted something that displays all values for all the common bases at once, and updates live as you type. After seeing Wincent Colaiuta’s WinHex, I new this was the Dashboard widget I wanted to build. A separate app (and one that has to be paid for) seems so 2004.
I’ve been wanting to tryout some of the new features of Tiger, and after already having written some automations, tweaked Apple’s RSS screen saver to word wrap the headline with Quartz Composer, and tried out Spotlight, the next thing I wanted to do was make a Dashboard widget.
In between work and World of Warcraft, I’ll find the time to finish it off.
REALBasic used to be my IDE of choice for application development on the Mac. Hopefully, this little coup will keep them going strong. I still have a soft place in my heart for REAL Software. Currently, I’m anticipating the release of Tiger and Xcode 2.
Update: Updated link to Xcode page. Apple recently released more info on Tiger.