April 15th, 2005
Natural Date Formatters are Cool.
The Cocoa Frameworks on Mac OS X have some very cool things in them.
One of the very, very coolest - that relatively few people know about, and I should imagine even less people use, are NaturalDateFormatters.
Bascially they allow you to enter a date in English-like syntax, and it will be automatically converted into a form that the computer recognises.
e.g. It’s a friend of mine’s birthday today, and another’s was a couple of days ago. I realised that I didn’t have their birthdays in the Address Book, so I added them pretty quickly, without ever looking at iCal - or clicking on the clock to get the date.
Here’s how: (2.4mb MPEG-4 Quicktime Movie)
Cool, n’est pas?
p.s. Rendez-vous’s new name (’Bonjour’) is terrible.
