Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog (Archives)

Dan Wood Dan Wood is co-owner of Karelia Software, creating programs for the Macintosh computer. He is the father of two kids, lives in the Bay Area of California USA, and prefers bicycles to cars. This site is his older weblog, which mostly covers geeky topics like Macs and Mac Programming. Go visit the current blog here.

Useful Tidbits and Egotistical Musings from Dan Wood

Categories: Business · Mac OS X · Cocoa Programming · General · All Categories

Thu, 17 May 2007

Adding support for new file types in your application

Recently somebody asked us why Sandvox didn't have support for MIDI files. I tried it out and sure enough, even though Quicktime knows how to play a MIDI file, I couldn't import one into Sandvox.

It turns out that MIDI files are not listed as one of the UTIs (uniform type identifiers) built into Mac OS X.

Sandvox uses UTIs to match file types, as much as possible (since there are some methods in Cocoa that still — as of Tiger — don't have UTI equivalents). So I was able to fix this problem without actually changing any code!

See more ...

Fri, 11 May 2007

SXSW + eMusic "Mashup" : New Musical Discovery Bliss

sxsw emusic mashup How to discover and get some great new music:

  1. Download tons of free MP3s from the SXSW festival over bittorrent (2007, 2006, 2005).
  2. Slog through the music and find the songs that you actually like; throw away the junk.
  3. Get thee to eMusic and start searching for the artists that you liked. Amazing how many artists you are likely to find!
  4. Download albums from these bands. When you run out of music credits, well you gotta wait until next month or boost your subscription.

I have used emusic before, but now that I had the idea of finding bands from the songs I've found at SXSW, I now have dozens and dozens of albums that I'm ready to download.

If you like discovering new music, try this out!

(OK, this is a conceptual mashup, not a web 2.0 implementation ... that would be cool! And it has nothing to do with musical mashups!)