I am in need of someway to access the UI for the screenshot command in OSX (Cmd+Shft+4) and I would like to be able to activate the UI with a UI button that will screenshot the region selected and save it to a temp location.
Thanks in advance ;)
If there's a direct way to do this from Cocoa, maybe someone will chime in... but I doubt it exists. You can, however, get any behavior you want from the "screencapture" command line utility; it does exactly the same as Cmd-Shift-3 or 4 with a gazillion options. Just type "man screencapture" in Terminal to see all the flags.
But this would require you to run a bash script from your app. If you haven't done that before, well, google it, or check out the many threads here on SO... Opinions vary on how complicated it should be, from a one-liner call to system() to fully thread-safe error reporting NSTask and all kinds of answers in between.
I'd recommend using one of the NSTask answers which keep themselves to half a dozen lines, but YMMV.
Related
When using the magic function %edit from QtConsole with IPython, the call does not block, and does not execute the saved code. It does however save a temporary file...
I think this is intended behavior due to GUI editors and uncertainty, and whatever that reason is for not being able to communicate with subprocess (pyZMQ?).
What do you suggest as the best way to mix %edit/%run magics?
I would not mind calling two different commands (one to edit, and one after I have saved and execution is safe). But those commands need a way to synchronize this target file location, or someone to persist storage, and probably need some crude form of predicatably generating filenames such that you can edit more than one file at a time, and execute in arbitrarily. Session persistence is not a must.
Would writing my own magic do any good? Hope we can %edit macros soon, that would do well enough to make it work.
you shoudl be able to do %edit filename.py and %run filename.py. The non blocking behavior is expected, and IIRC due to technical reason. Not unsurmountable but difficult.
You could define your own magic if you wish, improvement are welcomed.
Hope we can %edit macros soon, that would do well enough to make it work.
For that too, PR are welcomed. I guess as a workaround/option you can %load macro which would put macro on input n+1 , edit it and redefine it, that might be a good extension for a cell magic %%macro macroname
If you have some executable code on your input (from QtConsole), you can type
%edit 1-5
This fires the editor, creates a temporarily file (automatically managed), and loads your input lines. This is nearly enough, now how to retrieve the name of that temp file pragmatically?
I see the print statement on Stdout, but its not visible to QtConsole AFAIK. Could maybe redirect stdout to catch that line, but that may not be an option anyway if your doing something else with stdout.
If I could retrieve the full pathname that was just created, this would be cake. Store it where some magics will know how to find it. Then issue a followup command when ready,pops the name off the stack, loads it into a macro, and run. All this with 2 input commands and no names to remember (unless you want to find and use that macro again, but for 1 shot stuff...)
How do I catch or retrieve the path of that temporary file?
Sometimes when looking at someone else's large Objective-C program, it is hard to know where to begin.
In such situations, I think it would be helpful to log every call to every non-Apple method.
Is there a way to do that? Basically, make one change in some central place, and log every method that is called. Preferably limited to non-Apple methods.
You can set the environment variable NSObjCMessageLoggingEnabled to YES. This will write a log of all message sends in the folder /tmp/msgSends-xxx.
You could add a symbolic breakpoint to objc_msgSend(), and have it log the second parameter without stopping.
How to do it for your own methods only though is a toucher task. Maybe if you could inspect the class name being called and do some magic to have a conditional breakpoint for only calls where the class' prefix matches your own?
I don't think logging every single call is practical enough to be useful, but here's a suggestion in that direction.
On a side note, if it's a large program, it better have some kind of documentation or an intro comment for people to get started with the code.
In any case, every Cocoa application has an applicationDidFinishLaunching... method. It's a good place to start from. Some apps also have their principal (or 'main window') class defined in the Info.plist file. Both these things might give you a hint as to what classes (specifically, view controllers) are the most prominent ones and what methods are likely to have long stack-traces while the program is running. Like a game-loop in a game engine, or some other frequently called method. By placing a breakpoint inside such a method and looking at the stack-trace in the debugger, you can get a general idea of what's going on.
If it's a UI-heavy app, looking at its NIB files and classes used in them may also help identify parts of app's functionality you might be looking for.
Another option is to fire up the Time Profiler instrument and check both Hide missing symbols and Hide system libraries checkboxes. This will give you not only a bird's eye view on the methods being called inside the program, but also will pin-point the most often called ones.
By interacting with your program with the Time Profiler recording on, you could also identify different parts of the program's functionality and correlate them with your actions pretty easily.
Instruments allows you to build your own "instruments", which are really just DTrace scripts in disguise. Use the menu option Instrument >> Build New Instrument and select options like which library you'd like to trace, what you'd like to record when you hit particular functions, etc. Go wild!
That's an interesting question. The answer would be more interesting if the solution supported multiple execution threads and there were some sort of call timeline that could report the activity over time (maybe especially with user events plotted in somehow).
I usually fire up the debugger, set a breakpoint at the main entry point (e.g. - applicationDidFinishLaunching:withOptions:) and walk it in the debugger.
On OSX, there are also some command-line tools (e.g. sample and heap) that can provide some insight.
It seems like some kind of integration with instruments could be really cool, but I am not aware of something that does exactly what you're wanting (and I want it now too after thinking about it).
If one were to log a thread number, and call address, and some frame details, it seems like the pieces would be there to plot the call timeline. The logic for figuring out the appropriate library (Apple-provided or third party) should exist in Apple's symbolicatecrash script.
Windows XP
The small company I work for just started using this command-line software and it's rather confusing and tedious. I was wondering if it would be feasible to make a GUI frontend and how I would start going about it.
If possible, I would like to have it get data to fill in dropdown boxes and such, but at the very least I'd like to be able to hit a button and perform whatever task. I have never done anything like this before so any help at all would be appreciated.
Thanks
There are two options here:
If the command line exe calls a dll or assemlbly to do the work, then you can work on a front end for the DLL based on the methods that it exposes (ie you can cut out the command line front end completely.
Alternatively you need to wrap the process that the command line runs in and catch its output, and pass it input as appropriate. There's a guide on how to write such a wrapper here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305994 (This one is based on writing the wrapper in c#).
One comment though - while it would be possible to do this in VB.Net using the illustrated techniques, doing it in VB6 would be much harder, or even impossible.
Cloud App has this neat feature wherein it automatically uploads new screenshots as they are added to the Desktop. Any ideas how this is done?
You can do similar things yourself without much in the way of programming. In OSX, you can configure "Folder Actions" to run a script, for example, when a new item appears in a folder, including the Desktop. You can then use the script to do whatever you want with the new files.
This article at TUAW includes an example of uploading files to a web server when they hit a particular folder.
So, basically, the answer is "Folder Actions", or "something's keeping an eye on the folder and sending notifications", at some level. Whether Cloud App uses Folder Actions or watches the folder itself at a lower level, using FSEvents/NSWorkspace, or the kqueue mechanisms (for which there's a nice wrapper class called UKKQueue, if I remember correctly -- don't know how current my knowledge is on that one though!) is another matter...
You could implement this at several different levels, depending on the outcome you want, how you want to design whatever it is you're actually doing, and even what kind of filesystem you're targeting. Fundamentally, in Cocoa/Objective C, I think you probably want to start looking at FSEvents.
Once you've got notifications of the file changes, I'd probably use something like ConnectionKit to do the uploading -- any library at all, really, that means you don't have to bother with the sockets level yourself -- but again, there's a lot of different ways.
Depends, really, what level you're looking to solve the problem at, and whether you want to build something for other people or get something working for yourself. If I just wanted to bash something together for myself, I could probably have something cobbled together using Coda's Transmit app, and Folder Actions, or maybe Hazel, and a minimal bit of Applescript, in a half-hour at most, that would do the job well enough for me...
I am not sure what you are asking for exactly. If you are asking for a way to take a screenshot programmatically in MacOSX, I suggest you have a look at the "screencapture" command (in the terminal, type "man screencapture" for doc).
If you want to do it the "hard" way, you should look at this.
The idea is that given a specific input to the program, somehow I want to automatically step-in through the complete program and dump its control flow along with all the data being used like classes and their variables. Is their a straightforward way to do this? Or can this be done by some scripting over gdb or does it require modification in gdb?
Ok the reason for this question is because of an idea regarding a debugging tool. What it does is this. Given two different inputs to a program, one causing an incorrect output and the other a correct one, it will tell what part of the control flow differ for them.
So What I think will be needed is a complete dump of these 2 control flows going into a diff engine. And if the two inputs are following similar control flows then their diff would (in many cases) give a good idea about why the bug exist.
This can be made into a very engaging tool with many features build on top of this.
Tell us a little more about the environment. dtrace, for example, will do a marvelous job of this in Solaris or Leopard. gprof is another possibility.
A bumpo version of this could be done with yes(1), or expect(1).
If you want to get fancy, GDB can be scripted with Python in some versions.
What you are describing sounds a bit like gdb's "tracepoint debugging".
See gdb's internal help "help tracepoint". You can also see a whitepaper
here: http://sourceware.org/gdb/talks/esc-west-1999/
Unfortunately, this functionality is not currently implemented for
native debugging, but I believe that CodeSourcery is doing some work
on it.
Check this out, unlike Coverity, Fenris is free and widly used..
How to print the next N executed lines automatically in GDB?