(What is PSIG? | PSIG 106 announcement)

Items of Interest

• My Startup Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley -- We're informed the teen author manages to make himself sound like a 40-year-old what with the dry writing and needless mention of shoehorns :)
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity -- I claim I am henceforth living David Allen's principles. We'll see how it goes!
• Sickert: the painter and his circle -- The story of Walter Sickert, an English Impressionist painter with some newly revealed connections to Jack the Ripper
• Nothing Sacred -- Autobiography of comedian Lewis Black
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed -- By the same guy who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel
• iFuntastic -- Make yer own iPhone ringtones
• Paul on the Xserve, Mini, iMac: "But aren't we so pregnant for a bunch of upgrades?"
• Steve entertains us with crazy stories from his awesome IT job at O'Hare. He also gets me curious about wxPython and the way you can use XML to define GUI with XRC. Most intriguing -- he predicts that the problem of computer viruses will grow hugely in the future, saying that crackers are most certainly in info-collection mode at the moment.
• The meeting ends with the sharing of nasty-food/bug/pyromanic stories!

NSToolbar

Great presentation by Dave and El Wolfo involving a cowboy hat, a gaucho hat, methods named "spanishize" that define anything starting with "El " as Spanish, and oh -- we got to see some live debugging ;). Summary:

Currently, Interface Builder doesn't help you create toolbars, so you either have to do it in code or use Belkadan's GenericToolbar palette.

Doing it in code: After allocating your toolbar, initialize it with a unique identifier (initWithIdentifier) so that Cocoa can automatically remember user customizations to the toolbar. You'll also have to set setAutosavesConfiguration: and setAllowsUserCustomization: to YES. Once you've created and set the delegate, tell your window to setToolbar:toolbar.

There are four basic methods you need to manage your toolbar:

• -toolbarDefaultItemIdentifiers: Specify default toolbar items. Remember to avoid name collision with Apple's standard items
• -toolbarAllowedItemIdentifiers: Choose which of Apple's standard items to allow. By default none of them are allowed
• -toolbar:itemForItemIdentifier:willBeInsertedIntoToolbar: Returns toolbar items as specified by the identifier
• -validateToolbarItem: Called on every toolbar item. The target and action must be set and responsive for this to work

GenericToolbar is the non-code alternative: It has a nice drag/drop interface for adding and removing items as well as hooking up items to your controllers. It doesn't work very well with bindings, so it's better to do those in code.

Thanks to Gruber for the great wwdc photo upon which this is based

C4[1] this weekend!

Ok, I think this is the most excited I've ever been about a tech event. I can't wait for the sessions and I'm hugely looking forward to meeting everybody. I'm actually going to be manning the registration booth so I'll at least get to greet everyone :)

Hay -- anybody out there have an idea for Iron Coder that could use my help? I'm pretty psyched about the announced "API" because it would seem I could easily make use of my art/design/webcode-fu, but I'm not coming up with any ideas...