New iPods

by

I couldn’t help but notice that the new iPod line up now mirrors the Mac line-up in a few respects:
iPod v. Mac lineup
The shuffle is the runt of the family, only deserving a colour refresh in the same way the Mac mini only deserves a meagre processor upgrade once a year. Also, neither of them ship with a screen.

The nano is pretty fresh, but is equipped with just a twentieth of the capacity of its bigger brother. With its smaller screen size, I guess you could say it’s comparable with the MacBook.

The new classic iPods, with 2.5″ screens and massive storage capacity — up to 32 times that of the original iPod could maybe, just about, possibly be compared with the MacBook Pros. I admit that the analogy falls down a little here as the nano to classic comparison is probably more like the low-end MacBook to “BlackBook” comparison.

The new iPod touch is, in my opinion, the iMac of the iPod line. Its looks are similar, its screen size is impressive and it’s pretty good value for money.

Okay, the analogy fails a little (again!) with the iPhone and the Mac Pro, but only thanks to storage capacity. The iPhone is clearly the most full-featured iPod with all the goodies that are absent from the iPod touch and (obviously) the ability to make phone calls. When the 16 Gb flash iPhone is (inevitably) introduced, it really will be the king of the iPod line-up.

Maybe that was all a load of rubbish, but either way, my 8 Gb “phat nano” (in black) is already on the way. I couldn’t really justify buying the touch, as I fully intend to buy an iPhone once they’re released here in the UK.

Numbers: some first impressions

by

Just to give it a spin, I started using Numbers today to record some information on transcription factor binding motifs.

Overall, I have to say the experience is very pleasant. First of all, the good points:

  • The ability to just drag PDFs, images, graphs and indeed spreadsheets freely around the canvas is excellent.
  • Adding steppers, sliders, checkboxes and menus to cells is made remarkably easy.
  • The live display of average, sum, maximum, minimum and the count of selected cells is very convenient.
  • The “Sheets” list (like a source list for spreadsheets) is far superior to Excels tabs along the bottom, even showing a collapsable list of the tables and graphs on each sheet:
    Sheets in Numbers
    While this is nice, the highlighting in the sheets list is very odd. In the screenshot, the darkened “Occurrences of mo…” graph is currently selected, but the Table is shown with my default selection colour as its background. I imagine Pierre would have something to say about that.
  • The new format bar makes trips to the Inspector far less frequent. Which is nice.

However, I also have a few reservations already, including the following:

  • Conditional formatting cannot take a “cutoff” value from another cell. For example, in the screenshot below, G2 is invalid. Only a numeric value can be entered when a comparison operator is selected from the menu.
    Conditional formatting limitations in Numbers
    If G2 had been a cell with a slider, one could envisage formatting changing on-the-fly while dragging the slider, which would have been awesome. Sadly it wasn’t to be.
  • No “freeze panes” option. Anyone who has used Excel knows (or can appreciate) how useful it can be to have your own column or row headers visible at all times when scrolling around. While Numbers ably keeps the row and column headings on screen when scrolling, no option equivalent to Excel’s Freeze panes seems to be available. This makes it a real pain to keep track of which column or row is which in a large spreadsheet.
  • Fairly limited graphing. Coming from a scientific background, I’d really like to see the graphs supporting error bars and some linear and polynomial regression (ordinary least squares at the very minimum).
    Numbers charts
    When compared with Excel, Numbers’s graphing options look decidedly sparse.

So overall, I’d say it’s a really nice 1.0 release and I think it hits the target market (“Spreadsheets the Mac way”) extremely well. While the addition of linear and polynomial regression is probably a slight frivolity for the users Apple has in mind (just use R!), I’d say that “freeze panes” is really essential for any spreadsheet package and cell references in conditional formatting would just be a great option to have.

I might post more if I come across any more nifty features or major shortcomings…

Cocoa and MySQL

by

While Core Data is able to use a SQLite database as its backing store, Cocoa sadly has no native support for full client-server style SQL. Third-party solutions are therefore the answer.

Looking around the web yesterday, I found a number of such solutions including a rather extensive document on OS X ODBC drivers, a rather slick-looking, but wallet-hurting ($700) SQL framework for Cocoa, called MacSQL (it even comes with an Interface Builder palette!) and the open source MySQL-Cocoa project.

ODBC is clearly the compatible, righteous and most open way to access a database, but is also probably the most “heavyweight” solution, which I didn’t really fancy tackling for my humble application. MacSQL looks very nice. The demo movies on their website are a little dated, but show that it really is a very polished solution that allows for a no-code approach to browsing a SQL database. However, it’s also $700 (they do offer a $149 version for hobbyists, but the resulting program can’t be distributed). So, the final option was MySQL-Cocoa.

First impressions of the MySQL-Cocoa project might suggest that it’s dead: the examples disk image link on the homepage is broken, the framework doesn’t compile out of the box on 10.4.10 and the latest news item was posted 18 months ago. However, a little searching reveals that a universal binary version of the framework is linked to from this page, hosted by the different, but similarly-named CocoaMySQL project. Excellent.

To use the framework, first download the bundled version and follow Dave Winter’s excellent guide on adding it to your XCode project.

Once that’s done, I found that the easiest way to actually use the framework was to also download the source for Lorenz Textor’s aforementioned CocoaMySQL program and copy these files into your own project:
Useful files from Cocoa MySQL

If the copying’s all gone well, you’re ready to go, so here’s some sample code to get you started. First of all, don’t forget to import the framework and the header files of Lorenz’s files:
#import <MCPKit_bundled/MCPKit_bundled.h>
#import "CMMCPConnection.h"
#import "CMMCPResult.h"

Once that’s done, you’ll probably want to set up a connection and a query result object, as follows:
CMMCPConnection *mySQLConnection;
CMMCPResult *queryResult;

Finally, you can now establish your connection to the database and start querying it, as demonstrated in the following (and, I think, fairly self-explanatory) code:
mySQLConnection = [[CMMCPConnection alloc] initToHost:@"127.0.0.1"
   withLogin:@"username"
   password:@"password"
   usingPort:3306];
if ([mySQLConnection isConnected])
{
   NSLog(@"Connected.");
   [mySQLConnection setDelegate:self];
   [mySQLConnection selectDB:@"databasename"];
   queryResult = [mySQLConnection queryString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"SELECT salary FROM table WHERE department = \"%@\" AND age BETWEEN %d AND %d ORDER BY age",departmentName,lowerAge,upperAge]];
   if (queryResult) {
      for (i = 0; i < [queryResult numOfRows]; i++) {          [queryResult dataSeek:i];          NSLog(@"%@",[[queryResult fetchRowAsArray] objectAtIndex:0]);       }    }    [mySQLConnection disconnect]; } else {    NSLog(@"Connection failed."); }

As with my last post, there's no real error checking here, but hopefully the sample code will at least help to get you up and running fairly quickly.