ranchero.com

TapeDeck 1.0

Brent Simmons — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:39:48 GMT

Tapedeck 1.0 “is a powerful and fun new audio recorder for Mac OS X Leopard. It’s just like your old analog tape recorder, only better. A lot better.”

It looks very cool.

AisleOne — NetNewsWire Style Version 2.0

Brent Simmons — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:11:41 GMT

AisleOne: “Version 2.0 features a design very similar to this blog, extending the visual experience of the site into your RSS reader. It’s simple, clean and easy to read.”

Comic Life Magiq

Brent Simmons — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:05:03 GMT

Macworld: “The original Comic Life took your photos and let you put them into panels that looked like comic books, complete with captions, dialog bubbles and other effects. Comic Life Magiq builds on that functionality with pre-built templates, ‘props,’ balloons and spraycans to help you tell a story using your own pictures.”

Sounds awesome — congrats to our pals at Plasq!

A Windows user’s conversion to Mac OS X — Part II

Brent Simmons — Tue, 06 May 2008 05:21:11 GMT

Peter Bright, Ars Technica: “Although XP itself was essentially unchanged, Microsoft did try to produce a modern, appealing platform for future development. That platform was, of course, .NET...”

Cocoa Is My Girlfriend T-shirts

Brent Simmons — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:23:37 GMT

CIMFG: “They will only be run for WWDC so they are limited edition!” (In your heart you know you want one. ;)

Learning to program for the iPhone

Brent Simmons — Mon, 05 May 2008 01:25:29 GMT

Rhonabwy: “As of yesterday, I might have a new tactic. Uli Kusterer has put up a ‘Learning C on the Macintosh’ tutorial site called Masters of the Void.”

Multi-Inflection-Point Alert

Brent Simmons — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:23:05 GMT

Tim Bray: “Near as I can tell, we’re simultaneously at inflection points in programming languages and databases and network programming and processor architectures and Web development and IT business models and desktop environments.”

Today 1.0

Brent Simmons — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:50:15 GMT

Second Gear: “Built on top of the same data engine as Apple’s iCal and Mail programs, Today lets you quickly see what events and tasks are on today’s agenda with the click of a button.”

Update: Justin Williams writes about entering the world of indie Mac development.

Developers need to get Spin Dumps as well as Crash Dumps

Brent Simmons — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:30:05 GMT

Dan Wood: “It would be much more useful if application-specific spin reports could be put into a user’s home directory, and made readable to that user. Then, third-party developers could cobble together a mechanism for reporting a hang, just like many of us do for crash reports.”

Saving Seconds

Brent Simmons — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:40:36 GMT

Rands in Repose: “Go find the Photoshop guru on your floor and watch him or her work. Yes, the mouse is in play, but did you have any idea how much manipulation he did via the keyboard? Want to know why? Because anyone who has a deep, meaningful relationship with a computer is constantly looking for a way to save a few seconds.”

Which reminds me of something I said parenthetically in a post about managing large Cocoa projects: “Remember, every time you touch the mouse, God kills a kitten. Use the keyboard if you have a heart.”

BusySync 2.0 Released with Google Calendar Support

Brent Simmons — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:19:58 GMT

TidBITS: “BusyMac released BusySync 2.0 today, an update to its software that synchronizes iCal calendars across systems. The new version’s primary change beyond bug fixes and robustness is the capability to synchronize with Google Calendar.”

More awesome Mac software from the Pacific Northwest. ;)

By the way, John Chaffee of BusySync will be presenting at next week’s Seattle Xcoders meeting on automating tech support using FogBugz, shell scripts, etc.

My Work on NetNewsWire

Brent Simmons — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:50:57 GMT

Brian Warren: “The little itty-bitty thing I worked on was the...”

Port Map and TCMPortMapper

Brent Simmons — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:58:53 GMT

TheCodingMonkeys: “Some times you want to access your computers at home from anywhere in the world. Be it the web server on your home server, the file sharing on your desktop machine or a remote login to your parent’s computer to support them doing their work. This is where the application ‘Port Map’ might come handy.” (New software from the SubEthaEdit folks.)

Side note: check out the screenshot and note how iPhone-style On/Off widgets appear in the app. I’ve also seen this in VPN Tracker. I wonder if we’ll see it in more apps, and if it will become a standard part of the Mac user interface.

Using NetNewsWire with Your Blog, Twitter, and Del.icio.us

Brent Simmons — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 23:15:30 GMT

MacTips: “One of the greatest things about the greatest RSS reader on the Mac, NetNewsWire, is how many things it can integrate with. It can go hand-in-hand with your blog, your Twitter account, your Del.icio.us account and many others because of its scriptability.”

Throwing Away Your Code

Brent Simmons — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:38:28 GMT

Nick Bradbury: “It's like trying to part with all those old mementos in your closet that you kept because they used to mean something to you.”

Me, I love deleting code even more than I love writing it. I think sometimes that I write code only for the pleasure of deleting it later.

On Twitter

Brent Simmons — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:35:52 GMT

Tim Bray: “I enjoy it for the background-conversation-hum effect, sort of like being in a busy coffee shop. And there’ve been a few times when I’ve got professionally-important news way before I would have seen it on another channel, or that I might otherwise not have seen at all.”

I highly recommend Twitterrific. (I’m on Twitter, cunningly disguised as brentsimmons.)

Coda Confidential (Cabel on video)

Brent Simmons — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:09:58 GMT

cabel.name: “Earlier this year I gave a talk (my first public presentation ever, actually!) at Johnny Rentzsch’s intimate and engaging C4[1] conference in Chicago.”

Cocoa Tutorial: Fixing Memory Leaks With Instruments

Brent Simmons — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:08:48 GMT

Cocoa Is My Girlfriend: “As I am getting toward what I think is the end of coding for an application I hope to release soon, the nitty gritty work of fixing leaks, optimizing code, and squashing bugs has become the majority of what I’m doing now.”

JS + BBEdit + SD

Brent Simmons — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:19:12 GMT

Seth Dillingham talks about how he came to contract for Bare Bones Software: “When I’m telling this story in person, especially if Rich is nearby, I like to say that they tried to call my bluff but found I wasn’t bluffing.”

Cocoa Blogs Update

Brent Simmons — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:31:40 GMT

Theocacao: The Cocoa Blogs feed is “now free to everyone — even those who have not made a donation.”