2718.us blog » mit

MacWJ: It’s like Windows Journal for Tablet Macs

2718.us — Fri, 07 May 2010 09:59:44 +0000

… because there are oh-so-many tablet Macs. There are ModBooks and there are non-Apple tablet machines running Mac OS X. So, if you have such a device and are looking for something that provides a surface on which to draw, write, etc., with various “pens” and with the ability to save to PDF and PNG, MacWJ may be of use to you. It’s open-source under MIT license.

MacWJ requires OS X 10.5 or newer and some sort of tablet-pen input, whether a tablet-form computer or a Wacom graphics tablet or something else of that sort. Ready-to-run recent build(s) are available on bitbucket, as well as the full source code.

Changing from BSD to MIT License

2718.us — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:56:43 +0000

I’m changing the license on most (maybe all) of my active open-source projects, largely because the MIT license does not have as many blanks that have to be filled in as the New BSD license and the language is a bit simpler. To the best of my knowledge, any rights granted under the New BSD license are also granted under the MIT license, so this is really more of a housekeeping/paperwork issue than a conceptual or substantive change.

If this is of concern for some reason, for the things that were under BSD license and no longer are, the version-controlled repositories still have older versions that are BSD-licensed.

A WebView Subclass with Isolated Cookie Storage

2718.us — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:38:14 +0000

Following the advice of Kevin Ballard on StackOverflow, I created IGIsolatedCookieWebView, a subclass of WebView that does not access or affect the system-wide shared cookie storage (shared among all WebKit apps). Each instance of IGIsolatedCookieWebView has its own cookie storage so that, for example, multiple instances of IGIsolatedCookieWebView within the same application can be logged in to the same web site with different credentials. IGIsolatedCookieWebView should be usable in place of WebView, except that IGIsolatedCookieWebView uses the resource load delegate, so that can’t be used by the application. IGIsolatedCookieWebView is published under ~~a 3-clause BSD~~ an MIT license.

A Drag-Resizable Subclass of NSComboBox

2718.us — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:57:02 +0000

IGResizableComboBox is a drag-resizable subclass of NSComboBox—that is, IGResizableComboBox should be usable in place of NSComboBox and it adds a small bar at the bottom of the pop-up list that can be dragged to resize the pop-up list. IGResizableComboBox is published under ~~a 3-clause BSD~~ an MIT license.

It still has some quirks:

~~behavior is strange when the pop-up is above the combo box (whereas it is usually below)~~ [fixed; when the pop-up is above the combo box, the drag-handle is at the top and the top edge moves while the bottom edge stays fixed at the combo box]
~~the formula for resetting the number of visible items after dragging occurs is not quite right~~ [fixed; dragging now snaps to whole-item positions]

Open Source (BSD/MIT License)

2718.us — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:24:58 +0000

I’ve released a few things as open source recently, under BSD or MIT license, hosted at Google Code.

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.)