Gawker 0.8.2

Gawker 0.8.2 has been released. This release fixes a bug that was introduced in 0.8.1 that caused desktop recording to not work correctly. Sorry ’bout that!

The source code for this version is in the git repository and has been tagged “v0.8.2″.

If you have Gawker 0.8.1 the new version will be picked up by ‘Check for Updates’, otherwise please download it manually.

Thanks!

Use Macam to improve Gawker’s camera support

Macam is a wonderful library that greatly improves the support for USB webcams in Mac OS X. The list of supported cameras is available here.

Gawker can take advantage of Macam, so check it out if you’re trying to get your USB webcam to work with Gawker. Just install the macam.component as directed and you’re set!

Gawker 0.8.1

Gawker 0.8.1 has just been released. This is the first release in a bit over 3 years! Time flies! I had figured that the recent crashing issue related to the stale update feed should be fixed as that was just extremely sloppy. The feed is now hosted on sourceforge.net which solves these problems. Big thanks to Daniel (Moird) Myers for his help with getting this working and sorting out the details.

Since the update feed is now hosted in a new place, ‘Check for Updates’ from within Gawker will not be able to grab this new version. Please download it manually. Future versions will be picked up.

This release also contains a fix for a bug that caused temporary files created by Gawker during recording to not be cleaned up. These files get created in /var/tmp/ and have names like tmp.0.*. You may want to check for these and clean them up if you’ve been using Gawker 0.8 and earlier.

The source code has been moved to git and is available here. The code for this version has been tagged “v0.8.1″.

I am hoping to blow the dust off of Gawker and continue development. There’s not much new in this release but it’s been a good way to jog my memory and get back into the swing of things.

If you’re interested in contributing or have any feedback, please drop me a line. Thanks!

If Gawker crashes on startup…

Some folks have been reporting recently that Gawker crashes on startup. This is related to the “Check for updates” feature which no longer works because where I was hosting the app feed for updates no longer exists since I cancelled my .mac account. Try disabling this so that it won’t check for updates and you should be good to go. If it crashes before you can get to the Preferences, delete your Preferences file and start Gawker, on first launch it’ll ask you if you want to check for updates on startup. The Preferences file is located under your home directory at:

Library/Preferences/com.wnka.Gawker.plist

Hope that helps, sorry for the inconvenience. I am without a Mac currently, if I get a chance I may release a new version that does not check for updates as I am not planning on making any in the near future.

Cheers-

You may now give me money.

I added a PayPal donate button to the Gawker website so you may now commence with the giving of money to me. Feel free to donate as much (or as little) as you would like. Or donate nothing. It’s all up to you.

I hadn’t thought of doing this before, but a Gawker user (fan?) suggested I do it, so it’s done. Of course, don’t feel obligated to donate anything, but if you use Gawker and enjoy it, make a donation!

Thanks!

Snail Racing

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories – Escargot Grand Prix
MAKE: Blog: Escargot Grand Prix – DIY Time lapse snail races

Windell Oskay of evilmadscientist.com created a really cool movie with Gawker that enabled some snails to give the appearance of going fast.  Awesome stuff!  The blog at Make picked up on this and, much to my surprise, Gawker showed up on their site.  Thanks to Windell and thanks to the folks at Make!

Gawker 0.8

Gawker 0.8 has been released.  New stuff includes scheduling recordings, ability to password protect shared cameras, improved timestamp appearance and user interface improvements.  A lot of little things in this one, mainly having to do with the interface and making things a little more friendly.  I’m not really much of a GUI designer so it was fun to sit down and think how things should be done. Lots of trial and error but it lead to some additional Cocoa knowledge which is a good thing.  I’d appreciate any feedback as to things I’m doing wrong/right.

I decided to move the development blog onto wordpress since iWeb really wasn’t cuttin it on that front.  I’m glad to finally have comments.

Gawker from Python

Gawker Image Fetch Script

Andy Carrel has written a Python script that will download images from a shared Gawker webcam and write the newest image out to a file. He uses it to put his webcam of Mt. Si on his site which you can see here.

I gotta say, it’s pretty cool to see someone do this and make Gawker more available to others. I have always wanted to add the capability to publish images onto a website since that is a much more robust/available sharing mechanism than the socket stuff that’s in Gawker right now. Maybe I’ll do that some day.

I actually wrote a Gawker client in Visual Basic a little while back since I had to learn something about .Net. If people are interested I could post the source for that, it’s real simple, just connects and gets the images from a shared camera. Doesn’t record or anything since I didn’t want to invest that much time in it.

The socket communications are really basic for Gawker, I would like to make them more robust but there are so many hours in the day.

Intel and PPC argument evaluation

n Cocoa, take the following class:


@implementation Callee
- (int)returnOne
{
NSLog(@"In returnOne");
return 1;
}


- (int)returnTwo
{
NSLog(@"In returnTwo");
return 2;
}


- (int)sumOfA:(int)a andB:(int)b
{
return a+b;
}


Ok, so a pretty boring class. If I were to do the following:

Callee *call = [[Callee alloc] init];
NSLog(@"Callee sum: %d", [call sumOfA:[call returnOne]
andB:[call returnTwo]]);

What would you expect the output to be? I was shocked to find that the answer differs depends on which architecture you’re on.

Intel:
In returnTwo
In returnOne
Callee sum: 3

PPC:
In returnOne
In returnTwo
Callee sum: 3

Why is this? This behavior causes a crash in Gawker 0.7.0 on Intel… it’s already fixed but I’m curious to know what causes the argument functions to get called in a different order? Anyone? Anyone? I’m guessing it has to do with endianness / optimizer / Obj-C not guaranteeing execution order.

Gawker 0.7.0

I’ve always gotten a lot of requests to add support for non-iSight cameras, so I sat down and figured out a good way to do it. Hopefully it works for most folks…. Gawker will now list all your available grabbers and you can enable, record, and share them independently. Version 0.7.0 also has some other new features, like desktop capturing, combining of up to 4 cameras, and a countdown until the next frame is recorded.

The desktop grabbing is really for novelty purposes only, I thought it would be interesting to timelapse me working on timelapse software. The 4-way shot above is the typical scenario: me working on Gawker while listening to records as the outside world keeps on movin’.

Cheers-