Building Your Own VS Code Extension for a Mac Touch Bar

Visual Studio Code is an excellent editor, with a ton of room for customization. As a recent convert from Emacs, I appreciate the ability to customize my editor through the form of extensions. Creating an extension is quite simple, if none that fit your needs are available in the marketplace.

What I Learned at CocoaConf Atlanta

I recently attended the Atlanta CocoaConf, a touring conference that focuses on Apple technologies (iOS and OS X). They have several conferences each year in major cities across the U.S. I chose Atlanta because it was December, and I needed a break from the cold Michigan climate. In this blog post, I wanted to give […]

Taking a Screenshot on Mac OS X

There are many ways you can take a screenshot on your Mac. The best method often depends on the portion of the screen you need to capture and how you intend to use the captured image. The tools and tricks themselves are not complicated, but pausing to look something up while in the middle of […]

Faster MacOS Drive Images with SuperDuper, SSHFS, and Netcat

I recently found myself needing to make a really thorough system image of my MacBook when my Mac OS install picked up some subtle corruption that was causing some really crazy suspend/resume bugs. I chose to make full system images with SuperDuper!, since it has proven itself quite capable in these matters in the past. […]

Bundler Hangs when Building Native Extensions on OS X

Recently another developer was setting up a new laptop. This usually goes fairly smoothly, but this time we ran into a glitch. Bundler just hung. We were rather frustrated. If you really want to skip to the end, the bottom line is: don’t try to build OS X C libraries on a FAT file system. […]

Disable Hiding on your Mac OS App

While developing a Mac app as part of a broader project, we realized that we did not ever want our app to be hidden from the user. There are some pretty good reasons why we don’t want the user to ever forget that they have our app running. Ensuring that the app’s always visible and […]

Localizing Strings in Objective-C

This post is based off Making Your App World-Ready, a WWDC 2013 session video. There are a lot of things to consider when trying to make an app available in multiple languages: Text length variations Text direction Translations Luckily, Objective-C makes localizing text a relatively less painful experience. In just a few steps you can […]

Aliasing Serial Baud Rates in FTDI Drivers for Mac OS X

For a recent project, I needed to interface my computer to an embedded device over a RS-422 connection at 3.2Mbaud. Since this is a nonstandard serial rate, I set out to find a way to configure a relatively cheap USB UART bridge that supported communications at this speed. FTDI makes a chip called the FT4232 […]

Effortless Pair Programming with Teleport

Pair programming is a valuable practice we use a lot — two minds working together tend to yield faster results and better solutions to problems. We usually slide the mouse and keyboard back and forth between the pair as we work. But recently many of us have been working off our Macbook keyboard and touchpad […]

STM32F4 Discovery Toolchain for Mac OS X

Update – I’ve since discovered an easier way to get a fully-functional bare-metal toolchain. See my updated post here. I recently picked up a STM32F4 Discovery board to play around with, and have been having a bunch of fun with it. While there are a few good articles already out there about building toolchains targeting […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

Mac OS X