DISQUS

Thanks again, Jon! This is awesome. I think it looks especially nice when the fill and frame colors are the same hue at different intensities.

And you're 95% of the way toward "NSPeaceProgressIndicator." :)

Yes! iMeem deserves credit. Lots of it - for choosing to do the UI in native Cocoa :)

Now if only this bridge would let me deploy a Cocoa-based UI on Windows!

Thanks for pointing this out. I probably wouldn't have bothered to sign up for an account just to try out the app, if you hadn't posted a teaser!

Mono looks cool, but let's not give more credit here than is due. The application *is* a Cocoa app, that's why it looks like one. They are clearly developing the UI independently from the back-end. In other words, the part that looks good and like a Mac took work.

I found this page on their site describing "Dumbarton," their bridging mechanism between ObjC and C#:

http://allan.imeem.com/blogentry/gbgC7kTg

Nice summary. I have been reading along with several of the bloggers' outrage and experience a mix of empathy for Karelia and agreement that the "silent install" factor is bad.

But heck, the "silent dial home" problem is still way worse than this. I run Little Snitch and am always amazed to observe the amount of net traffic applications think they can sneak in without my concern.

Cool! The only problem on my machine was that the output of sed doesn't strip out the "URL: " prefix as expected. I managed to get the behavior by changing it to this:

info $1 | grep 'URL: ' | sed 's/URL: //'

Also somewhere along the line you got smart quotes in your HTML, so the example won't work without editing after copy/pasting into an rc file. I fixed it in the line above by using ' instead of the apostrophe character.

Awesome!

I totally agree that every developer shouldn't write their own. Whether Apple or a 3rd party comes up with something even half as useful as what's been discussed here, it will be a big win!

I think you're expecting too much from what is essentially a glorified "file picker." It shouldn't be a global disk searcher. Not only would that be slow, it would include too much junk. I certainly wouldn't want to have to choose from among all the supporting JPEG and TIFF images included in application bundles.

I think Dan's suggestion is good, especially when taken to the logical extreme of incorporating it into the standard file picker. Then you would have a file picker that is capable of:

1. Browsing particular subsets of the disk.
2. Browsing well-known collections (such as "iTunes Music).
3. Searching within any focused collection.
4. Displaying selectable items in a context-sensitive presentation, e.g. as a list of songs, or as a matrix of thumbnails.

The Windows standard file picker, at least, has a built-in thumbnail tiling view.

I also think you overstate by quite a bit the ease of throwing something like this together. If you can do it in an afternoon, then *please* do so and share it with the rest of us. This is the kind of thing that has a lot of tiny facets, each of which has to work perfectly in order to be a satisfactory generalized solution. Just getting the selectable, resizeable, tiling matrix bug free would probably take a fair bit of work, unless you have one lying around.