Though I haven’t yet gotten around to putting a page for it up on the website, I’ve put a Subversion repository online with some code that other developers may find useful. At the moment, the repository includes a couple of classes and projects as follows:

ADProgressIndicator

A really simple class that allows you to create a circular progress indicator which presents a close button when moused over. The Finder uses something similar when it’s syncing iDisks or Time Machine backups; it’s also useful for toolbars where a dedicated close button would seem somewhat out of place.

ADEmbeddableToolbar

A clone of the toolbar-like view found in iPhoto and iWeb at the bottom of the window to work around NSToolbar’s refusal to be placed anywhere but at the top of the window. It supports both standard buttons and custom views, and will hide or show them as it is resized. This is actually used in the latest version of Selenium, and has some basic support for assigning keyboard shortcuts to items.

ADTablePrinter

ADTablePrinter is a class to allow you to print table views in a vaguely attractive fashion. While NSTableViews can be printed, they don’t make any efforts to get the data to fit, and tend to get cut off in a nasty fashion. ADTablePrinter works around this by taking the contents of the table as a couple of arrays and creating an HTML table with the data. This is then rendered by WebKit, which will happily wrap and resize the table to fit nicely when printed. Check the project for an example of how to use it.

ImageDiff

ImageDiff was originally written as an add-on to my iSight-based pizza guy cam, which I have mounted underneath my roof. This allows me to watch for pizza or other deliveries without having to go downstairs, allowing me to continue working on things. Unfortunately, it still required watching QuickTime, which gets annoying after a half hour or so. ImageDiff solves this by monitoring a video feed or comparing two images, and determining whether or not there’s motion between the two images or frames. I’ve got the sensitivity fairly low to avoid detecting trees moving in the wind, but it can be adjusted quite easily. Here’s a screenshot, to give you a basic idea:

That’s all for now - I’ll likely add stuff in the future, though. The code is all BSD licensed, so basically do with it as you please. Patches are gladly accepted - just send me an email. The repository itself is located at svn://www.stuffediggysoftware.com/gonfunko. Enjoy!

Selenium 3.2 is out today, bringing with it an assortment of tweaks, bugfixes and features. The main feature associated with this release, and one of the coolest yet, is that Selenium now allows you to upload and download documents to and from Google Docs. This is especially helpful if you need to conduct research with several other people, as you can use Google Docs to easily share the latest copy of your research with all involved. While you cannot yet replace or update a document on Google Docs, I plan to include support for doing so as soon as Google’s API allows it. Selenium 3.2 also adds a few enhancements to the PDF annotation mode. As far as bugfixes are concerned, this release fixes a couple of crashers and several other annoyance-level bugs as well.

If you’re already using Selenium, this version is a free upgrade and is highly recommended. If you haven’t yet tried Selenium, now would be a great time; just head on over to the download page and snag a copy. 

To close out this post, if you have any questions or ideas for future versions of Selenium, please let me know - it’s great to get feedback from users, and your wishes might just come true.