Cocoa’s NSSound provides a blindingly simple way to play back audio asynchronously, and even provides some metadata and control over how the audio is played back.

It uses the default sound device, by default. It gives you the ability to change the output device.

According to the documentation:

- (void)setPlaybackDeviceIdentifier:(NSString *)playbackDeviceIdentifier
	
Specifies the receiver’s output device.
	
playbackDeviceIdentifier
    Unique identifier of a sound output device.

That’s it. What is the “Unique identifier of a sound output device”? What format is this “Unique identifier”? How do I get a list of the “Unique identifiers” of the available output devices on my system? (more…)

In the wee small hours of this morning, Kineme Interactive Media released its first commercial product, QuartzCrystal.

QuartzCrystal is an offline renderer that turns Quartz Compositions into portable QuickTime movies. It supports 3rd party plugins, as well as patches that do not work in safe-mode-only environments (such as QuickTime Pro). It also supports software scene antialiasing, so if you have a Mac with plenty of RAM and a hard-core video card, you can make spectacularly beautiful renderings of your plugins, effects, and compositions.

Beside QuartzCrystal, the only other product that renders and encodes compositions to movies is Apple’s own QuickTime Pro, which doesn’t support plugins, unsafe patches, or antialiasing.

It took a few minutes for cwright and smokris to realize what was different yesterday. Yes, the days had finally come. I had begun to shave my proverbial neckbeard. More than year after and much like similar happenings, 7/15/08 is a day that shall live in infamy.

I have an Apple product once again. 黒林檎（くろりんご、kuroringo）is born! (more…)

Data integrity is a hot topic these days. With data volumes on the rise and hard drive half-lives falling, protecting data has become important in many different fields.

Conventionally, a storage medium will report its life expectancy in terms of MTBF, or Mean Time Between Failures. This is often measured in hours. However, it’s not always this simple. Usage patterns and environmental characteristics take a heavy toll on how long our storage devices last. (more…)

In the past couple of months I thought about spending some money on either a Nintendo Wii or a multi-purpose media box (not to mention my anxiety over buying an unmodifiable blackbook). Over the past 3 years I’ve looked at smaller cases as “better”. Before that it was always the full tower case that provided more room and ease-of-use. In this vein I’ve been looking at the world of mini-itx for the past several months.

VIA created the mini-itx specification for itself, but since its creation other companies started creating motherboards with this spec and recently so has Intel. The spec allows for a low-power consumption CPU, which is great for point-of-sales machines, thin clients, and more. The other use of mini-itx, popular amongst personal users, is as a Home Theater PC (HTPC) or media center.

(more…)

(First, yes I do realize the ‘X’ in ‘OS X’ is pronounced “ten” not “ecks.” I simply like the portmanteau.)

With the release of Leopard, I discovered the need to migrate my existing Tiger system onto an external drive. I needed it to be bootable, and I wanted to have a little discontinuity as possible. Apple generally makes this pretty easy, but it’s still a bit involved. I write this article from my migrated system, currently booting Tiger off of a USB drive. (more…)