So that suspenseful post didn’t last long…

Horos is out now… For those of you who are huge, huge fans of the Sane Magazine horoscopes, who also happen to have a Mac. Which has the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X (10.5) installed on it. Which also has access to the Internet. So for my wife and myself. Maybe. Maybe it’s just for me.

At any rate, it’s a very 1 dot oh piece of software which will fetch down the specially formatted (and long under-used) XML version of the horoscopes and display them on your desktop. Just in case, you know, you were too lazy to click on the link above each week to get your fill of horoscopes with no real bearing on your life (even less if you’re a Libra).

There are some features planned for the 2.0 release which include popping up when new horoscopes are published, choosing your horoscope to be displayed when new horoscopes are fetched, sending people’s horoscopes to them via email based on their birthday.

But that’s 2.0. Not 1.0. Which is what this one is. And it has significantly less features than this imaginary 2.0.

I have no idea, nor do I have the time to look into why the Sane mails have suddenly stopped.

I rewrote the mailer to move from nail to a python-based mailer, which *looks* like it’s doing the deed, but, umm, doesn’t.

So I’m thinking of moving to FeedBurner, if only to provide email subscription access to the feed updates.

What do other people use?

I don’t know if the Sane main issue writer is just really old (well, it is… 2001 or so, which is old, in software terms, I suppose), but this little Cocoa app that drives Sane Magazine each week (umm… except for the last two, since we’ve been on… hiatus/vacation), needed a little upgrade recently. But moving it to Leopard the other day I noticed that it still used Find By Content’s FBCSummarizeCFString() function… which was new as of 10.2 and deprecated as of 10.4 (doh). This was for the handy dandy summary of the latest issue we produce. A little known, little used feature, but there it is. At any rate, to get our summarization up to speed, it just took a little digging and a tiny little bit of work.

So I figured I’d write about the quick and easy fix, since it took me a few minutes of digging to find the replacement function to use: you need to look into Search Kit.

A combo of SKSummaryCreateWithString to get an SKSummaryRef and SKSummaryCopySentenceSummaryString on that with the number of sentences you want to limit it to gets you back to where we were with FBCSummarizeCFString.

CFStringRef myTextString = CFStringCreateCopy(NULL, (CFStringRef)[[self mainText] string]);
CFStringRef mySummaryString;
UInt32 numOfSentences = 2;

SKSummaryRef summaryRef = SKSummaryCreateWithString(myTextString);

mySummaryString = SKSummaryCopySentenceSummaryString(summaryRef, numOfSentences);

Enjoy.

The very first 3rd party iPhone Web Application.
From the Sane Magazine issue announcing it:

It is the ultimate iPhone application. Designed by our crack staff in OmniGraffle and a few other web technologies, it is a crude rendering of an iPhone, which is optimized to ensure the viewer realizes that they do not have an imaginary iPhone, but the real deal, 100% beautiful.

It is also further designed to perform such that, if the owner of the iPhone is running the application and is showing it off to their friends, who are, as of yet, iPhone-less, they they most certainly do not have an iPhone, and are stuck with crude renderings of one, if that, while you, the iPhone owner, has the real thing, and can view such compelling applications as the Sane Magazine/Q.I. Software iPhone Web Application.

So go get your first taste of the iPhone apps to come…