The Elegant Chaos Blog

When you’re developing an application that provides Services in OS X, you sometimes need to change the definitions of the services.

These are stored in the info.plist in your application, but just changing it and rebuilding the application isn’t enough, you also have to force the system to re-index the services so that it spots your changes.

You can do this by calling NSUpdateDynamicServices() in your application, or by running /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs on the command line.

I recently came up against a problem with this though. When pbs scans, it seems to just pick up the definitions from the first version of a given application. If you’re developing, you often have multiple copies lying around, and you don’t seem to have any control over which version pbs will come across first.

I’m guessing that pbs simply scans your volumes in alphabetical order. I had an issue where it was picking up an old version of an app in the “Archived Applications” section of the “Derived Data” folder on a different partition, before finding the version that I had just built.

I’ve found a simple fix which worked for me - simply move the new application into /Applications temporarily, and run a scan. This seemed to be enough to get pbs to pick up the correct app. Whether it will always work, I’m not sure, and it’s a pain to have to keep copying it there if making multiple changes, but luckily the services settings are something that you tend not to have to tweak very often.

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June 03, 2011

Finally, we’ve completed our relocation, and are now based in Stornoway, in the Outer Hebrides. This is quite a change of scenery compared to South London!!

The move has been a great distraction over the last few weeks, so there hasn’t been a great deal of development work on Neu, Ambientweet, or any of our other projects.

However, the internet connection here is just fine, and as the dust settles I should once again be able to focus on development. First priority is checking both Neu and Ambientweet for Lion compatibility. After that, I’m hoping to finally get an initial version of Ambientweet into the store, and to work on some updates for Neu.

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May 10, 2011

At the end of May, we are finally completing our relocation.

We’re moving all the way from South East London (down at the South East end of the UK), to Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides (right up at the North West end of the UK), so it’s quite a major operation.

Hopefully it will all be done by the 1st of June, and within a week or two of that the dust will have settled. In the meantime though, we might be a bit slow responding to email! Please bear with us…

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April 10, 2011

I’m happy to announce that Neu version 1.0.4 is now available, both from this website and the Mac App store.

Version 1.0.4 is a bug-fix release, identical to 1.0.3 with the exception that the preferences should now work correctly on the Mac App store version!

To find out more, or give Neu a spin, please see the main Neu homepage.

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I’ve submitted Neu 1.0.4 to Apple for review.

The only difference between it and 1.0.3 is that it fixes the bug with the Mac App store version of Neu that prevented some of the preferences panels from showing.

I’ve also made it immediately available here, for non Mac App store users. It really is no different from 1.0.3 for them though.

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