BravoBug News

Coming soon, Lotus Meditation Timer v4.1. This new update is in development and will be made available for download soon. Lotus 4.1 includes a fix for a bug that sometimes prevents the third timer chime from sounding. It also contains a few other small enhancements. Thanks for your support, please stay tuned.

The blog has been a bit quieter than usual as I am slaving away on about 6 BravoBug projects at once, including some new stuff that hasn’t yet been announced here. But I wanted to write a quick personal Thank You to everyone who has registered their copies of EasyBatch, MiLife, IconBurglar, Blackout, MBB3k, or donated to Lotus. BravoBug is not a big company. And every single registration makes a huge difference in supporting these apps and letting me spend my time working on them, and I am grateful for that opportunity. I hope I can keep improving the existing apps, and I hope you will find that the projects in the works were worth the long wait.

Thanks again for your support! -Matt

Here’s a fun little experiment you can do which is an interesting way of revealing some ‘gotchas’ with the internal math used by your computer. Here’s the code:

    float x;

    x = .5;
    if(x == .5)
        NSLog(@"x is .5");
    else
        NSLog(@"Whoah! X is actually %f",x);
   
    x = .7;
    if(x == .7)
        NSLog(@"x is .7");
    else
        NSLog(@"Whoah! X is actually %f",x);
   
   
    x = .7;
    if(x == .7f)
        NSLog(@"x is .7");
    else
        NSLog(@"Whoah! X is actually %f",x);

You can run this yourself, or just check the actual output below.

 x is .5

 Whoah! X is actually 0.700000

 x is .7

At first glance this might seem odd. You would expect that .7 is .7 is .7. But such is not the case as far as your computer is concerned. In the second example (where the values are found to be unequal, and yet the output appears to show that they are equal), the lack of the “f” on the end of the comparison value means that the compiler interprets that literal .7 value as a double. And a float with .7 is not equal to a double with .7. The specifics of why this is so can be explained by floating point math ‘lack of precision’, which is all fine and dandy, but at first glance it sure seems strange that .7 does not always equal .7, especially since .5 in this case always equals .5!

This is a perfect example of why sometimes it is important to understand the inner workings of how the processor actually performs its math and value comparisons, especially with floating point variables. I find this kind of stuff fascinating because normally as I code I think of the computer as processing these kinds of instructions in the most fundamentally logical and reasonable way (ie, .7 = .7 = .7), and yet it’s fun to bump into these little situations where things don’t behave quite the way you might expect at first.

In other news, for those of you who are visiting to check the status of the recent updates announced for several of BravoBug’s shareware apps (EasyBatch, IconBurglar, Blackout etc.), I wanted to thank you both for your support in registering and also for your patience, I am working on getting those updates out as quickly as possible. Thank you for visiting, -Matt.

Here’s a quick and easy one that comes in handy every now and then. Most of the time you can just rely on Cocoa’s -copy methods sent from the Edit menu, but sometimes you want to deliberately place a specific bit of text on the Mac clipboard. NSPasteboard makes it easy:

-(void)copyToClipboard:(NSString*)str

{

    NSPasteboard *pb = [NSPasteboard generalPasteboard];

    NSArray *types = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:NSStringPboardType, nil];

    [pb declareTypes:types owner:self];

    [pb setString: str forType:NSStringPboardType];

}

By the way, the blog has been quiet this past week but it’s not due to a lack of activity. There’s quite a few big BravoBug releases being worked on simultaneously, so the blog’s been neglected a bit. But stay tuned, good stuff to come! Thank you for stopping by. -Matt

BravoBug Software is happy to announce today the release of Lotus 4.0, a new update to its meditation tool for Mac OS X which provides several new features including sessions, a new ‘native-Mac’ GUI, and much more.

Check out the official press release below, or download Lotus right now. Lotus is free. If you find it useful BravoBug asks that you make a donation to help support its development.