• asLJCore is the primary component of the LiveJournal client asLJ, managing all communication with the server.
• YDDecode is a Cocoa class wrapped around some public-domain C code for decoding data encoded with YEnc.
• NCIDStatusBarMenu is a utility to help pull NCID-based callerID notifications and display them as Growl notifications (among other things).  I’d been meaning to update it for nearly 2 years with no success and the future isn’t looking much better, so I’m releasing the source instead.

(My musings on licensing below the cut.)Permissive BSD/MIT licenses because in writing asLJ among other things, I’ve had to work to find libraries, frameworks, components, classes, etc., that weren’t GPL-licensed so that I could continue to choose how I wanted to release my software.  I am also heavily influenced by the simplicity of the BSD and MIT licenses compared to the lengthy GPL (and while the LGPL ought to be workable for many libraries, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the language of it–the LGPL is several paragraphs of modification to the GPL).

(The song lyrics and commentary for OpenBSD4.3 have a lot to do with how I feel about GPL versus BSD/MIT.)

• This is the first thing I’ve ever written with Objective-C/Cocoa and the first OS X-native GUI app I’ve ever written. This is also the first release. There are probably bugs.
• The preferences have no default settings yet.
• The program won’t create the log file if it doesn’t exist.
• If you don’t have Growl, you will be prompted to install it at some point. Install it.
• The lookups to whocalled.us may make use of /usr/bin/curl, but I think that’s in the base install of OS X 10.4+
• Requires OS X 10.4+

When I learned about Network Caller ID (NCID), I knew it was exactly what I wanted. I’ve got an old, but caller-ID capable, modem in an old OpenBSD box and it grabs all the caller ID data and serves it up. The only thing left is to get that data to each machine.

I was very disappointed in the choices in NCID clients for OS X. I settled on using David LaPorte’s shell scripts that hook into the command-line tool for Growl notification. This worked pretty well. Annoyingly for me, I get calls about every half-hour during the day, six days a week, mostly from “Toll-Free” or “Out-of-Area” and my annoyance with not knowing who’s calling had led me to whocalled.us. I was able to use Maxim Samo’s junk_lookup.agi script to help me modify David LaPorte’s scripts so that now all my incoming calls were looked up on whocalled.us. This worked reasonably well.

I now had an AppleScript app on my desktop that ran the shellscript that started the command-line NCID client that triggered a shell script that used curl and some other voodoo to query whocalled.us and reprocess all that info into a log and into the command-line interface for Growl. If I were busy all the time, I wouldn’t have given this a second thought, since it worked. But what I really wanted was a single program with a nice little menu thing up by the clock that controlled it. So I learned some Objective-C and some Cocoa and here’s the result.