Mac on Jamie Montgomerie’s World Wide Web Log

Setting up Gentoo Linux on UTM on Apple Silicon

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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These are my notes on setting up a ‘headless’ Gentoo Linux installation on UTM on my Apple Silicon Mac, with the Apple Virtualization ‘backend’.

I’ve updated these as of December 3rd 2024.

Coolson’s 10th Anniversary

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Ten years ago, my wife Emily and I made two games: Coolson’s Artisanal Chocolate Alphabet for iPad, and Coolson’s Pocket Pack, for iPhone (and iPad). Coolson’s Artisanal Chocolate Alphabet won a BAFTA, and was for a while featured on Apple’s iPad web page!

I recently spent some time lightly remastering both games for modern devices, and they’re now back on the App Store, and free!

Coolson’s Artisanal Chocolate Alphabet now works on iPad and Apple Silicon Macs, and Coolson’s Pocket Pack now works on iPhone, iPad and all Macs (the Mac version is a great distraction when you need some down-time at work!)

I’m not sure how many people who know Em and me actually know about our past lives as award winning(!) indie game developers - so I thought I’d write a bit about it here. I found a surprising number of pictures too!

Using the Ultra-Wide High-DPI Prestige PS341WU with a Mac

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

For over a year now, I’ve been using an MSI Prestige PS341WU as my main display. It plugs into my MacBook (now, an M2 MacBook Air of my own, previously mostly a 16" M1 MacBook Pro from work).

At the time I bought it, it was about the only reasonably priced ultrawide that also stood a chance of being considered ‘retina’ - and a casual browse around now seems to indicate that is still the case.

Re: Stewardship

Wed, 29 Jan 2014 14:13:23 +0000

Editorial note: Yesterday, I sent a draft of this post to Mattt Thompson, the author of the article this is a reply to. He was kind enough to send a very gracious reply. I thought about reformulating the post in an attempt to express or explain our differences of opinion more directly, but decided that I would be doing him a disservice by doing so. Instead, with his permission, this post contains my original draft, followed by his reply. Please do read both.

THIn

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 23:40:53 +0000

I open-sourced a little bit of, as I’ve been calling it on Twitter, “THE GAME” - that is, the game Em and I’ve been working on: “THIn”: Three easy ways to do things later in Cocoa/Cocoa Touch.

THObserversAndBinders

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 13:29:58 +0000

I wrote some key-value observing (KVO) and key-value binding (KVB) helper classes for iOS and Mac OS X. Not much more to say about them than is in the ReadMe file on GitHub. I’m pleased with them. Comments (and pull requests) welcome.

Sparrow, Promise, and Feelings of Betrayal

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 15:01:55 +0100

Google has acquired the development team that produces the excellent Mac and iPhone email app Sparrow. Development of the app is being stopped so that the developers can “[join] the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision.”

Like many, I find this news disappointing. I bought both the iPhone and Mac versions of Sparrow. I use it daily on my iPhone, and intermittently on my Mac. It’s a great app on both platforms. I’ve been very happy with my purchase so far, but I have to admit I felt a little betrayed when I heard the news of the acquisition.

YACYAML

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 21:37:53 +0100

I posted YACYAML, the Cocoa YAML parser/object archiver I’ve been working on for a little while to GitHub today. It converts Cocoa objects to and from YAML, a plain text, human friendly data serialization format.

YACYAML can be used in lots of ways - from replacing plists or JSON for simple config files, up to storing entire custom documents in an easy to view (and easy to hand-edit) format.

Why have I made this?

The short answer is that I like YAML. It’s ‘nicer’ than plists and JSON to edit, and it’s far, far, nicer to look at than NSKeyedArchiver’s binary representation (which, to be fair, wasn’t meant to be human-readable in the first place, but I think it would be good if it was).

iOS' Hidden Base64 Routines

Fri, 18 May 2012 17:54:19 +0100

It’s commonly held that iOS has no built in Base64 routines (a strange omission, if you ask me). Pootling around in the BSD headers today though, I discovered this is not entirely true. There are a couple of functions hidden away in libresolv.dylib. That’s the, err, BIND-9 DNS resolution library… If you’re not put off by linking to BIND just to get Base64 translation, it’s easy to use. Here’s the interface (publicly declared in a less readable fashion in resolv.h):

Support the Gorillas on World Usability Day

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 11:45:42 +0000

Today, November 11th, is World Usability Day. To celebrate, the good folks at Clearleft wil be donating all revenue from sales of Silverback, their Mac ‘guerilla usability testing’ app, to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

Silverback’s a great app [full disclosure: I did some work on the latest version, but I’m pretty sure I would think this regardless] for performing quick, simple usability testing of your Mac app, web app or web site (or even Windows app with VMWare or Parallels!). It records what’s happening on screen, along with the user’s reactions using the iSight camera, and you can play back and export these recordings later. It’s simple to use, and can scale from simple in-the-coffee-shop or pub tests (“Hey, would you like to test out my new app? I’ll buy you a coffee!”) to use in full-scale usability labs. It’s well worth the asking price on any day, and today there’s an even greater incentive.

Using the Mac or iPhone's Built In Regex Routines

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:29:33 +0000

In which a convenient method of using POSIX regular expressions from Objective-C is presented.

It’s a common complaint that the Mac and iPhone platforms don’t have native support for regular expressions, but that’s not entirely true. If you drop down to the UNIX core, there’s an implementation of the old (and only partially busted) POSIX regular expression interfaces. Here, I’ll show a simple Objective-C wrapper class for them that lets you use them conveniently in Mac or iPhone apps.

Syntax of the Future Past

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:21:26 +0100

There is a fair amount of complaining on The Internets at the moment about Objective-C and Apple’s choice to use it for the iPhone. Many newcomers to the ‘platform’ (if I can apply a singular name to Mac and iPhone development) are finding the language - and the Cocoa frameworks based on it - very confusing. Just how can a language with sooooo many square brackets! be at-all easy to use, after all?