The first importer is “Toxic Configuration Importer”. This imports most plain-text based unix config files and Mac OS X plist files.

The second importer is “Toxic Logfile Importer”. This imports all “.log” files as plain text. You can use Smart Folders to monitor your log files from the Finder. Beware that this is can be very expensive (log files are updated a lot).

The final importer is “Toxic URL Importer”, this code imports URL clippings. These are the files you get when dragging a URL from an application to the Finder. This is probably the most useful importer of the three and I’ll be making a follow-up post just for this importer later.

Download a disk image with installers with all three importers.

WebNoteHappy is my new favourite bookmark manager. Unfortunately version 1.0 doesn’t import OmniWeb (a browser for which I have had a tempestuous on again/off again love affair for several years). I happen to know that forthcoming versions of WebNoteHappy will support OmniWeb amongst other browser but I am all about instant-gratification.

So newly checked into my new subversion repository (which now seems to be up and running fine) is OmniWebToXBEL (OmniWebToXBEL.zip). This shell script uses sed, tidy and xsltproc to convert the OmniWeb bookmarks file into an XBEL file. You can then import the XBEL document into WebNoteHappy.

1) Added code to write CoreImage images (CIImage objects) to a QuickTime movie (currently hardcoded to mpeg4) using QTKit. Now you execute Image Units against the video frames coming in from the camera and save the output to a movie. Pretty neat. At the moment it isn’t very efficient because I convert the frames to NSImages as an intermediate step (which I think takes the pixel data out of the GPU video ram and into RAM) – instead I think I can use a CoreVideo surface directly (but QTKit doesn’t support CoreVideo directly yet – I have more sample that i need to put online that enables QTKit and CoreVideo to work together). I also need to control the Sequence Grabber API a little better and try to prevent it from doing superfluous work (i.e. i need to put it into pure “preview” mode).

1.1) There are a couple of categories on QTMovie (part of QTKit) for conveniently creating movies and appending frames to it (note the timing code in the append frame code is wrong – which is why, if you watched the movie that accompanies the code I look like I’m dancing around like an idjit) and a category on CIImage for some handy dandy conversions (cropping, scaling, conversion to NSImage – thanks to Dan Wood’s code archive for most of that code).

2) Created a couple of specialised Image Units. This is really just an exercise in cikernel (really a subset of OpenGL Shading Language – that link is worth following btw) programming. I’m actually impressed with how easy it is to write cikernel code.

3) Actually that last item is a white lie. I didn’t create any Image Units – what I did do is create a CIFilter subclass that takes the cikernel code as an input parameter attribute and an array of user defineable input parameters that will get passed to the kernel from Cocoa. This allows you easily play around with cikernel code without having to create a separate target in Xcode and then dick around with using CIPlugin to load the Image Unit (why doesn’t CoreImage load all .plugins from my application plugins directory automatically?). It is pretty cheap and easy way of creating a Core Image filter without any administration work. See CCIGenericFilter.h/,m and CMotionDetector for more details

Screenshot: QuadScreenshot.png (rather large – but note the CPU bar in the dock.. Even with all three filters running it was barely denting the CPU).