Animations only work when the node is already in the scene

If you try to add an animation to an SCNNode that’s not yet part of a scene graph, nothing will happen.  It won’t give any indication of failing, and the performance of rendering implies it’s still running them, but there will be no visible effect.  So, addChildNode: and then addAnimation:forKey:.

Radar or GTFO

Just ran across this old post by Daniel Pasco, which showed again up in NetNewsWire presumably because of some RSS reboot on their end.  Anyway, it reminded me of dealing with 3rd party developers – mostly indirectly, through Developer Relations – and the trials it involved. I particularly like the captioned picture of Mike.  Nice.… Read more

Different icons for release vs debug builds

Ben_hawk asked how to do this on Stackoverflow, and I was both curious how to do it myself.  Turns out it’s not too tricky – see my answer in the same post. A big reason for doing this even early in development, prior to distributing builds to anyone else, is that it makes it much… Read more

keyDown: fires even when your app is in the background

It appears that the standard behaviour for an NSView (NSResponder in general?) is for it to “hold onto” pressed keys.  That is, if a key is held down the view will keep getting keyDown: events until the key is lifted, no matter what else happens.  So it can lose focus or the app loses frontmost… Read more

SCNView may change your point of view

Ugh… SceneKit is both promising and frustrating.  It appears to be a very stereotypical case of “version 1” syndrome – nice idea, flaky implementation and very skimpy documentation. So amongst the many strange, undocumented foibles it has, one in particular is quite egregious.  When you add an SCNNode to your SCNView-rendered scene, containing an SCNCamera, the… Read more

New iMac’s SD card slot

I find it odd that I haven’t seen or heard a single comment about the latest model iMac’s SD card slot being on the back, buried amongst the inaccessible ports.  People complained quite vocally about it being merely on the side.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

In a word: clusterfuck. I really enjoyed Modern Warfare.  It’s one of my favourite FPS’s of all time.  It was fun, challenging, had an interesting storyline… it was “realistic” but not to the point of losing the whole point of the game – to be a game, a form of entertainment.  Alas, Black Ops is… Read more