Note to self: codesigning for OS X and iOS on the command line

As a reminder for myself, here is how you can codesign an OS X application for the AppStore on the command line:

codesign -f -s "3rd Party Mac Developer Application: Your Company" -v YourApp.app
productbuild --component YourApp.app /Applications --sign "3rd Party Mac Developer Installer: Your Company" YourApp.pkg

There is a lot more to do, of course, like having the correct bundle ID set, but this speeds up codesigning, if you do not use XCode to build your application.

For iOS it is pretty similar, except you don't need the productbuild:

codesign -f -s "iPhone Distribution: Your Company" -v YourApp.app

Fixing broken GNU texinfo dir file on MacPorts

Somehow, MacPorts does not seem to update the GNU texinfo dir file contained in /opt/local/share/info. But there is a nice script available in the ctan, which generates a new dir file. You can download it here.

Saving matplotlib plots as PDF

I recently started using matplotlib together with PyQt, and I love it. It's awesome and has many more features compared to PyQWT. However, I needed to save the plots to a PDF file. Here is how you do that:

import matplotlib.backends.backend_pdf
...
   @QtCore.pyqtSlot()
   def printPlots(self):
      filename,_ = QtGui.QFileDialog.getSaveFileName(self, "Save plots as PDF file", "", "Portable Document File (*.pdf)")
      if filename == "":
         return
      pp = matplotlib.backends.backend_pdf.PdfPages(filename)
      pp.savefig(self.plotFigure)
      pp.close()

Assuming that your figure is called self.plotFigure. You can connect the above slot to a QAction and map it to some nice menu item or shortcut.