Cocotron is alive and kicking

It's been a long time since I've updated the blog and every once in a while someone who finds the project asks me if the project is still alive. Those who use the project already know the answer - YES. The developer group is active and the repository is very active. Simply put, I have been busy coding and not blogging.

With a lot of progress behind us and some exciting ports ahead and in-progress, I have decided to blog more so people have a better understanding of the big pieces being working on. I'll be dropping the silly entries (they are hard to do actually) and be more informative. Stay tuned ...

Rogue Amoeba donates RAOperationQueue to Cocotron

Makers of fine audio software for both Mac and Windows, Rogue Amoeba recently released an open source workalike of NSOperationQueue called RAOperationQueue.

Recognizing that Cocotron needed an NSOperationQueue implementation they also released a copy of RAOperationQueue under the MIT license for Cocotron. The Cocotron will be integrating RAOperationQueue as NSOperationQueue and moving the implementation forward. This is a big help to Cocotron as we will be able to start with a tested and functioning implementation right away.

Thanks to Mike Ash at RA for putting this together. Mike has helped Cocotron in the past and continues to be a friend of the project.

FileMagnet Uploader and Cocotron

FileMagnet is a popular iPhone application which allows you to copy files from your computer to your iPhone and view them on your iPhone. The desktop portion for MacOS X was written in Cocoa and when Ken & Glen Aspeslagh wanted to do a Windows port they decided to use Cocotron. They have written about their successful experience in their blog post Adventures in Cocotron.

The Cocotron project now accepting donations

The fundraising goal for FY2008 is $50 million which would pay for a new R&D facility, team building exercises in tropical locations and a (small) fleet of supercars for the directors.

I am personally kicking off the fundraising with a very generous $10 donation.

Total raised so far: $10

Please donate now and support your favorite open source project!

If the $50 million goal is not met, the balance will go into the coffee fund.

gcc 4.3.1 update

Johannes has updated InstallCDT to gcc 4.3.1. The MinGW environment has also been updated to the most current, w32api-3.11 and mingw-runtime-3.14. Patches are not required for the MinGW headers anymore now that gcc supports ObjC++.

Cocotron gets some Objective-C 2.0 support via gcc 4.3.0

Johannes Fortmann recently contributed a new InstallCDT capable of installing gcc 4.3.0. Included in his gcc 4.3.0 patch set is compiler support for properties and fast enumeration. There is still work to be done to completely enable these in the runtime but Johannes has been making progress already.

Recent Cocotron patches by Johannes also completely enable @try/@catch which had been present in the compiler but needed runtime support.

InstallCDT-2008-03-29 page

You'll need to svn up to r106 to use gcc 4.3.0

My name is Cocotron and this is my jam

Brian Whitman over at The Echo Nest writes:

hi Christopher,

We develop our audio analysis and synthesis platform in Cocoa and test on OSX but wanted to start releasing web apps using our stuff. We found out about Cocotron last year and have been making great use of it, and recently we've been releasing some of our stuff -- an analysis API ( you can get at the alpha version at http://developer.echonest.com/ ) and also an on-line beatmatching tool ( http://thisismyjam.com ) -- both could not have been possible without the Cocotron. They both run on amazon ec2 machines and we've had practically no problems with the port.

Just wanted to write and say thanks for creating the project.

Brian


Cocotron's Jams

My latest jam embedded:



Wow, very cool stuff and completely simple to use. I should also point out they are running on Linux. One impressive point is how few problems Brian reported to get here.


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