The Axamblis Blog has been around for about 1 1/2 years now. Unfortunately I ended up not having as much time to write posts as I had hoped the day I installed the WordPress webapp. That was mostly due to the fact that I was in my last year of school and therefore hadn’t much time for blogging. But now that I’ve passed my exams and graduated, I’m taking a year off to dedicate myself more to software development and to get Axamblis ready again. This change in life also brings me some time to write regular blog entries which I will try to do as good as possible.

Refurbished Look

But do I want to write blog entries in this WordPress theme of mine, this rather dark and shabby looking enclosure? Hell no. So I sat down and started to design an all-new theme for WordPress which integrates itself into the rest of the Axamblis website. This makes the blog feel like it really belongs there, and not as it were some completely isolated place hidden behind a subdomain on my server. So the new design looks a bit like a newspaper and is way more lightweight than the old one. The comments look nicer, the blog is a bit better arranged and the overall reading experience is more relaxing due to the lighter color palette.

One thing I realized once again when I was drawing the graphics for the blog in Photoshop: Someone really should write a replacement for Photoshop which…

1. is easier and more efficient to use
2. looks better and is faster
3. and doesn’t drain your bank account that much.

Maybe I’ll take a look at that if I’ve got enough time this year.

Anyway…

…enjoy your stay at the Axamblis blog. I’d be happy to receive comments or emails on stuff you didn’t like, you especially like, or you would like if it was there.

P.S.: I’m serious about that Photoshop thing, someone really has to write a replacement… Cheers !

» Download the episode

This is the very first episode of the Axamblis Developer Podcast. We’re looking at how to create a custom NSToolbar which aligns a subset of its items along the right side of a split view divider in the same window. This behaviour which makes the items feel like they stick to the divider can also be found in other apps like Apple Mail or Espresso (my favourite web editor, by the way).

In order to get the desired bevaviour we make use of some undocumented API in the NSToolbar class, and we use method swizzling to inject some custom code into the NSToolbarFlexibleSpaceItem class.

The category used for swizzling methods:

• NSObject-MethodSwizzling

The project file (Xcode 3.1 and higher) as well as the .h and .m files:

• SplitViewAlignedToolbar Project
• SplitViewAlignedToolbar Header+Implementation

Enjoy the show and drop me a line if you have any comments or questions or other feedback!