So I’m sitting here and I’ve been working on and off tinkering with iTunes plug-ins. I used to love a waterfall spectrograph plugin that I had for Winamp back in the day. It’s something that I’ve always missed since I moved over to iTunes years ago.
Now there is the SpectroGraph plugin by Dr. Lex. I like it’s colors, but I want it to scroll, not just run across the screen. Based on that code is an updated version called HontoGraph.
So I played in the past with fixing the plug-ins to do what I want, but I never got very far because, frankly, QuickDraw (which iTunes uses for visualization) is a mess. I’m not sure what they’ll do in Tiger (when QuickDraw is gone), but for now if you want to make a plug-in you either have to mess with QuickDraw, or use a 3rd party toolkit that isolates you (like VisKit).
Well a week or two ago I finally realized the stupid reason things were always crashing on me. Obviously a pointer error, but I got the time and drive to fight for a long time to figure it out. Once I had that, I quickly got a version of HontoGraph doing what I wanted it to. It still has bugs (it’s not perfect, it can “forget” to scroll sometimes, etc.). But really I’d like a version based on SpectroGraph, although I may copy some of the HontoGraph features into it.
So I grabbed the latest copy of the SpectroGraph source and I’ve been trying to build it and I’ve been running into problem. After a while I remembered a note on the page with the source saying you have to have XCode 2.4 or newer. I hadn’t updated XCode in a while so I checked and sure enough… I’m running 2.3
The big surprise came when I went to get a new copy of XCode. Once I found it on the tools download page, I noticed something. I remember that XCode wasn’t small, but this version is… 924 MB.
I can’t download that at work. I’m not sure I can even download that overnight on my connection at home (all depends on the other site and how fast it is).
So here I am with a few moments of free time and motivation to work on the plugin… and I can’t test anything I write because of my old XCode version.
And why doesn’t Software Update check XCode for me like the rest of the Apple software on my Mac?
In other news, when it snowed here a few weeks ago I was able to get very close up pictures of birds on our deck eating seed. I may put some up lated.
