Of all the free extras that Mac OS X has, Grapher has to be one of the coolest. This little app, hidden away in the Applications/Utilities folder, is a powerful graphing tool for mathematical equations and data sets.

As you might expect from Apple, it typesets symbolic math beautifully and produces smooth, anti-aliased graphs. But this isn't just a little tech demo to showcase some of OS X's technologies: Grapher's features blow away your crusty old TI-83, and it comes with its own set of surprises. For example, not only can you save graphs as PDF or EPS, but it can export animations and even doubles as a LaTeX formula editor.

In fact, it does so much that its main weakness is the documentation, which only covers the very basics. The best way to learn Grapher is to look at the handful of included examples, although it might take you a while to find out how to replicate them from scratch.

The other day I needed to quickly graph a couple of things involving complex numbers, and it seemed that Grapher was doing some very freaky shit. Either that, or my math was really rusty. It turned out I'm not as stupid as I thought, and there are some weird caveats with using complex numbers in Grapher. Oddly, there is very little information online about it, so I figured for future reference, I should document the workarounds I discovered.

Let's dive in. Fuck MS Paint, I've got math to do.

(Note: this post assumes you know and like math.)

I did some googling and it doesn't appear to exist. Does anyone know of a QuickTime component that can play old-school tracked music files (like .mod, .s3m, .xm, .umx, ...). There's a bunch of great music out there, and it would kick ass to be able to import into iTunes.

Maybe something to hack on for 2007.

Update: this is actually not that difficult. I've looked at the source for Xiph.org's Ogg Vorbis QuickTime libraries, and the source is pretty clean and complete. If I can interface it with e.g. FMOD for mod playback, it could work. Let's see how far I get...

Greetings from Amsterdam. I'm here for the second day of CocoaDevHouse! About 20 geeks have been camping out in the Post C.S. building to gather, discuss, develop and generally have fun.

I've mainly come to work on my first Cocoa app (LemonJuice) and benefit from the expertise of people who actually know the API ;). I've gone from "typing a bunch of random crap" to "doing cool stuff with ridiculously small amounts of code". Cocoa is definitely interesting, and far more powerful than the Windows API I've used for a couple of years.

More details inside...

Life is full of nice surprises.

Last week I decided I would start learning Cocoa (for the unaware, that's one of the two APIs/Frameworks for creating applications for OS X). Partially, because I have some cool ideas I want to try out. Mostly, because I want to be able to make applications that are just as nice as all those other sweet programs I've come to depend on since I joined the cult.

So when I was doing some undirected browsing yesterday I found out that Andy 'Termie' Smith is helping organise CocoaDevHouse Amsterdam. I'm definitely going to go there. It'll be interesting to be a total newbie at a geek event for once ;).

It's only 2.5 hours by regular train, and I have a laptop and a copy of the Apple Developer Docs to keep me occupied on the way. Interesting for those of you on the other side of the pond: the typical Belgian (and generally Western-European) mentality would consider such a trip a significant adventure. That's what happens when everyone is so focused on their own little patch of land. For me, it's now just 'popping over'. I might be back later for Barcamp Amsterdam II too.