After my article on Special Folders, a few people asked how to open a file in the default application. For example, if I open a JPEG, whichever application is registered as the default app for JPEGs will execute. This is roughly analogous to ShellExecute in Windows. The question was also asked about opening a URL in the default browser and also sending an email with the default mail application. These

Awhile back I wrote about music technology being one of the areas pushing new user interface\interaction technologies, such as the Kinect, and the Wii before it. Well, I’m a little behind on this one, but this video preview of AudioGL is another example, this time in terms of 3D UI. Apart from the opening credits, the first section is a pretty standard, albeit slick, 2D interface along the lines of

There was a question on the ADUG list last week about how to retrieve “special folder” locations on OS X. By special folder, I mean locations like the user’s Home directory, the Documents directory, Temp directory, etc. I thought I’d write up the solution both because it’s probably something that more people will be wondering and also because it’s a nice little introduction to calling out to the OS X

I’ll be in Canberra showing off Delphi XE2 and FireMonkey this Wednesday for ADUG. I know numbers are limited (we’ve been hitting venue capacity in most cities this tour) so if you’re going to be in the area, head here to register

The ADUG Committee have started organising next year’s Symposium, and have created a short survey for feedback on topics that you might want to see. So, if you’re a Delphi or C++Builder developer and there’s a reasonable chance you’ll be in Australia around March or April of next year, then make yourself heard by filling out the survey

I know a number of people in the Delphi and C++Builder world are taking their first steps into OS X. To be honest, I’m not that many steps in either. So I thought I’d start posting some tips as I strike problems and solve them, so hopefully it’ll help someone else. Today’s problem (and solution) was the need to do a file and folder comparison on OS X. I’d had

I promised to post more details of these upcoming events when I could. Well, now I can. Current cities: Auckland (04 August 2011) Australia (Sydney/Melbourne, 11-12 August 2011) Seoul (12 August 2011) Taiwan (4 cities, 16-19 August 2011) Mumbai (17 August 2011) Bangalore (18 August 2011) Jakarta (9 September 2011) …and here’s the very high-level description: Whether you are building new applications, or migrating existing systems, this workshop will help

Natural User Interfaces are developing at a furious pace. It seems like the Kinect has really put a fire under this space. One of the more interesting (and potentially embarrassing) examples of this I’ve seen recently is using a webcam and some custom face tracking software to control music software via OSC. There are a few videos below. A lot of early momentum around alternative input mechanisms seems to happen

Interesting article on designing the new OSX client for GitHub. I especially liked this fundamental observation about prior OSX GitHub clients: “every OS X application that’s showed up over the years gave up and tried to turn CLI commands into buttons.&#

Uwe Schuster just keeps on adding new features to VersionInsight. If you’re using Subversion he’s posted a long list of changes/fixes/new features here. He’s well underway on adding Mercurial and Git support as well and LiveBlame is looking very cool also. If you haven’t updated the version of VersionInsight that comes with XE to the Community version yet, he’s even got you covered with instructions. Nice one Uwe!