Geiodo

Admichat is an idea I dreamed up a bit ago. It lets admins communicate with their viewers!

The idea is to create a simple word press plugin which adds the admichat bar. It’s a little button at the bottom right hand corner of the window, which, if clicked, opens up a chat. Whenever a user loads the web page, the admin of the website will be alerted to their presence. At that point, they can start up a chat with that user!

It’s an experiment to see if I can at all gain any viewership by having friendly conversations with users as they come in.

One in three things will happen:

A:

I scare potential readers away

B:

Readers get used to being chatted with, and if I ever stop, they will all go away

C:

It’ll be a total success and help addict people to the site.

I’m hoping C, but, with my luck, it’ll be B, or, more likely, A.

If C happens, I’ll publish it to the WordPress plugin directory.

If B happens, I’ll close down the project and kiss my viewership goodbye. There is just no way I can keep up with it.

If A happens… I’ll close down, and hope and pray to god I did not scare off too many potential viewers.

Hi! Better Battery Alpha is here. Please note this IS an Alpha (Not even a Beta). That means it’s experimental.

Key features missing:

• Does not install its self for life. You need to run the program when your computer starts up.
• Does not have preferences.
• Does not have an application icon.

Those are just some of the features which I will add in later releases.

Until then, here is Better Battery Alpha:

Download

I’ve been working hard at Better Battery. Got around the issue with the NSProgressIndicator by just using an image similar to one, and looping the position over time.

But, that’s not really what I am here to talk about…

BetterBattery is nearing completion! Yep! Pretty soon, the Alpha will be out.

Alpha release checklist:

• Make the Status Bar Display: Check
  • Make the basic status bar: Check
  • Make the status bar flash red when critical: Check
  • Make the status bar display moving lines when charging: Check
  • Make the status bar moving lines blink when nearly full: Check
• Make the application force sleep at 5% battery power: Check
• Make the application send growl notifications for different stages in battery power: UNCHECK
  • Detect change in battery power: Check
  • Send growl messages: Check
    • Configure various messages for different levels: Uncheck

At that point, I’ll be done, and release Better Battery Alpha!

Well… That’s not quite true… I am waiting on some questions to the growl community before I go ahead and release. These questions relate to Better Battery Beta, but are relevant to Alpha too. (Though they will be a hidden feature in Alpha)

That’s about it. Alpha will probably be available tomorrow!

Ooorr, do the apple developer docs just plain out suck?

Last night, I was running into MAJOR issues figuring out how in blazes to get the battery level! After a while of googling, I managed to find the following IOKit docs:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/IOKit/IOPowerSources_h/index.html

That’s great, but, apple dev being apple dev… It doesn’t tell you what to import. Just a lousy little “IOPowerSources.h”

Turning to StackOverflow, I managed to get some help, and I’m here to share that with the rest of the world!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6502949/iokit-iopowersources-troubles

To get to the import(s) of whatever it is you are trying to use, first, you have to add the framework. I, being an idiot, thought the framework was… All ready there..

To do that, well, that will take some googling. Apple messes around with Xcode ALOT, and every version has a different way of doing it.

For me, double clicking my target, going to the general tab, and editing the list towards the bottom called “Linked Libraries” did it, but, then again, I am still using Xcode 3.2

Once you do that, you have to open the framework, and manually search for the H file (In this case, IOPowerSources.h) and then look at its location.

To convert its location to an importable form, do the following:

First off, find the path from “Headers”

In this case, it was “/ps/IOPowerSources.h”

Then, append the name of the library to the front, and surround with the proper import syntax, end result being:

#import <IOKit/ps/IOPowerSources.h>