Keeping QuickSilver Alive

These days everyone uses Quicksilver. Even people who haven’t left Windows yet are trying to use Quicksilver. The problem is that Quicksilver (by the admission of its creator) is loaded with bugs. And about 1 time out of 10 (maybe a lot more) it will crash.

One person I know suggested using Spotlight to open Quicksilver. That’s not a bad solution, but I have a better one: use launchd to immediately restart Quicksilver when it crashes. (You’ll hardly even notice that it died, except when it consistently fails to do the same thing: for me it always dies when I try to launch Firefox or Thunderbird with it. Every time.)

First, download and install Lingon, a very nice program from Peter Borg.

Once you have Lingon installed and running, click “New” to create a new agent. I recommend selecting “My Agents”, since you (probably) don’t need Quicksilver running any time except when you are logged in. (If other people have accounts on your computer and you want everyone to benefit from this, you might prefer to choose “User Agents” instead.)

In field #1, give it any name you like, as long as you’ll be sure it’s unique. You could follow the reverse-domain-name convention if you like, and so have a name something like this:
com.brandonzylstra.quicksilver.launchd

In field #2 enter
/Applications/Quicksilver.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicksilver, assuming you have Quicksilver installed in your Applications directory. If you have it somewhere else, adjust this accordingly.

In field #3, check “Keep it running all the time no matter what happens”

Then click the “Save” button, and log out of your OS X user account. Now OS X’s launchd will relaunch Quicksilver within seconds of its death.

RubyCocoa on iPhone

I’m currently downloading (‘as we speak’–it’s 2.1 GIG) the iPhone SDK, after recently playing around with developing toy apps last night in RubyCocoa.

The idea is irresistable (if not slightly implausible) that it just might be possible to build iPhone apps with RubyCocoa. A quick Google search suggests that others are asking the same question, but no one seems to have an answer. But something on Apple’s site suggests that this might be possible:

The applications you create with Ruby and Python are packaged exactly like native Mac OS X applications. Your end-users will not be able to tell the difference. What’s more, Apple is committed to binary compatibility between releases of Mac OS X. This means you will no longer need to embed the runtime and language interpreter in your application.

So they’re saying that (for non-iPhone RubyCocoa development, at least) you don’t *need* to embed the (RubyCocoa) runtime and language interpreter in your application. This implies that it is possible to embed the runtime for RubyCocoa, and if it’s possible to do on a Mac, why not on an iPhone?

Does anyone know any reason that this would or would not be possible?