It’s not supported currently in Xcode 3.2 on Snow Leopard. Your best bet is to start from scratch, and do the manual move the build settings to the new target from the old target.

I’ve had the great fortune of being able to help test this the past few months, and even with all the other great iPhone Twitter clients out there, I keep going back to using his.

Best Twitter so far on Birdfeed?

@erikprice: Birdfeed is, without question, the Helen Hunt’s rain-soaked breasts of iPhone Twitter clients.

If you complain about the price of $4.99 – just think, it’s about the price of a good loaf of bread – and I guarantee you’ll be supported for a long time on that $4.99.

• Being a father to a wonder 10 month old daughter.
• Exploring iPhone development

Yes, that can take up a ton of time.. well, all my free time.

A great blog post by Justin on thinking about what your next application needs, but also what it doesn’t need. Worth the read.

(Via Ranchero.)

Brent makes some great points on Steven’s essay, both worth the read.

I often think similar things about the state of development software these days.. Xcode and Interface Builder, while great, still aren’t as far as I was hoping we’d be by now.

When I try to help young people get into Mac programming, I realize just how complicated it still is. Learn C. Learn about objects. Learn Cocoa. Learn Interface Builder.

It just seems too hard, doesn’t it?

I don’t know of a solution. Do you?

I just ran across this wiki about the Newton 2010 date problem (Props to StevenF) – after 18:48:31 on January 5, 2010 a NewtonScript int variable overflows, and well, problems happen.

I know when we were working on the Newton in the late 90′s, we weren’t really considering 2010 – in reality who really does? That was 14 years away, we were bound to still be around by then, right?

Well, maybe not. Maybe your code is going to last that long. Maybe some structures or patterns you’ve designed seem fine, but have some upper boundary that you’d NEVER HIT.

Start looking for those problems now. If you find them, stop, and spend the time to fix them. If you can’t because of a fixed API… well.. what do you do then? Make sure you fail gracefully.

The key in Gruber’s argument is this: 

And those of you who object to these generalizations — those of you shaking your heads and saying to yourselves, No, I very much do want to specify by hand the file name and location in the hierarchical directory structure for every bit of data on my system — are almost certainly, I would wager, computer programmers. To argue that users should embrace manual file system management for every bit of data they wish to store is to argue against human nature.

My parents, in fact almost every non-programmer I’ve met doesn’t get documents. Often they don’t get folders either. 

Worth remembering when writing your next indie Mac hit…

(Via Rands In Repose.)

A must read if you have great ideas and you want to share them with friends…

(Via Manton Reece.)

If you procrastinate forever, just because you won’t see results anytime soon, you’ll find yourself looking back 10 years later and wishing if only I had just planted that tree / started that new software project, it would have been done by now.

In other words, don’t let the weight of potential work stop you from doing the right thing.

(Via carpeaqua.)

Well well worth the read…

(Via rentzsch.com: Tales from the Red Shed.)

I went last year, and I highly recommend it if you are an indie developer, or want to be an indie developer. This year, I won’t be able to attend, for a very good reason of which I will get into later on in the month.

Update: Ya, I should get caught up on things – it’s sold out… at least the videos should be available later on in the year.

First and most importantly, the Cocoa programmer’s focus is always the end result for the user, not the academic sophistication of the code.

(Via Theobroma Cacao.)

The topic is Core Animation, folks will be showing little examples that they’ve written, and what they learned about Core Animation.

5:30 pm – snack and chatting before we start
6:00 pm – Q&A Session (bring your Cocoa questions)
6:30 ish – Show and talk about Core Animation
7:30 ish – finished, hang out time

Feel free to arrive at 5:30 pm for some snacks and chatting before we start up. If you arrive late (past 6pm), you will need to call my cell phone and we will send someone down to let you in.

Apologies for the late details – join our Google Groups list to get the very latest:

http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-cocoaheads

Extensis Portland (Google Map Link) – 1800 SW 1st Ave, Portland, OR – Suite 500

Update: Thank you for the very cool demos and good discussion – and the hangout time afterwards! I hope to post code later on in the month.

Interview with Extensis software engineer, Lucien Dupont

 

I’ll be giving a small presentation on NSOperation and NSOperationQueue, two really useful classes that are available in Leopard for doing background operations. They are particularly important in todays’ day and age of multi-core Macintoshes, and useful for doing background processing in a nice manner on an iPhone or iPod touch.

5:30 pm – snack and chatting before we start
6:00 pm – Q&A Session (bring your Cocoa questions)
6:30 ish – Presentation on NSOperation and NSOperationQueue
7:30 ish – finished, hang out time, show cool things time, show iPhone apps??

Feel free to arrive at 5:30 pm for some snacks and chatting before we start up.

Extensis Portland (Google Map Link) – 1800 SW 1st Ave, Portland, OR – Suite 500

John sent me his presentation, feel free to download it and play with his examples.

Next month I’ll be doing a talk on NSOperation and NSOperationQueue, as it’s something I need to learn about for my personal programming project I’m currently working on. March 12 at 6pm, mark your calendars.

(Via Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog.)

Some great advice from Dan Wood on what he would change if he went back in time to when he started his mac indie company.

Feel free to arrive anytime after 5:30pm, the downstairs doors tend to get locked at 6pm. We’ll start off at 6pm with a round of Q&A, as that worked really well last time, and start the hands on talk at around 6:30pm. Food will be provided.

Location details:
Extensis Portland – 1800 SW 1st Ave, Portland, OR – Suite 500

—-

CocoaHeads Portland meets tonight, Wednesday, November 14th at 6pm at Panic’s offices in the Pearl in downtown Portland. Here’s the url to map, they are on the 3rd floor.

I will be giving a presentation on what’s new in Cocoa in Leopard – and I’m really excited about all the new features and API’s that Apple has given us in 10.5. I’ll have some slides and some demo applications that show off these new apis and controls.

The outside doors at Panic also get locked around 6pm, so please call me at 503-819-8904 if you arrive and they are locked. We’ll start with some introductions, a brief history of Panic, and then my presentation. The presentation will start at about 6:20.

We have a google group that I encourage you to join, I send out email reminders to that list. http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-cocoaheads

I also have access to edit the cocoaheads.org web page for Portland – please bookmark it.

Our December meeting will be fellowship at a pub or bar somewhere, if you have a good suggestion for one that doesn’t have smoking in it, please leave me a comment.

Also – last months meeting had Brian Doyel presenting on custom controls in Cocoa. He has provided a url to the example project he showed, it is located at http://www.balance-software.com/CustomSlider.zip.

PS: MarsEdit rocks for writing blog posts.

(Via Glorified Typist.)

Rich Siegel, whom Jennifer and I talked with on multiple occasions at C4[1], writes a great article on the C4[1] Saturday night panel talk, and his take on a particular question. It’s worth the read if you are interested in Macintosh development.

Kevin Hewitt started a weblog, and his first post is the Python examples he showed us at this months meeting.

Thanks to the folks that attended. Future plans – November is talk about and show Leopard – bring your cool Leopord example apps. I am thinking about doing a presentation for September on my learnings at C4[1] this past weekend.

And if anyone knows more Macintosh developers in Portland, please let me know. I need to promote this more!!

It’s at Extensis (url to map, we’re on the 5th floor).

Food will be provided, and please arrive before 6pm because the doors are locked.

We’ll start off with some food and chit chat, and perhaps ask any development questions of folks. Bring them all, easy and hard, we’ll see if we can get them answered.

The main attraction this month is Python – Kevin Hewitt is going to give us an introduction to Python on OS X. This should be pretty interesting, given development articles like this about developers who know Python really well writing what looks like a great Macintosh app.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow night!

PS: I also encourage you to join our Google Group to keep up to date with meeting announcements: http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-cocoaheads

Pizza again will be provided. Arrive before 6 so that the doors downstairs are still open. If you get here after 6pm, call or text me on my cell phone.

Unfortunately the guest I was hoping to have didn’t materialize, so we’re going to talk about the WWDC keynote and the iPhone. If you want to demo an application, bring it along! If you have cocoa questions, bring them along. We’ll have a door prize drawing, the one we forgot to do last time!

Also, before we break for the night, I’d like to set a standard date for the meetings so that folks can plan in the future (like the 2nd Thursday or Tuesday of every month).

Update: We had a pretty good meeting, with a few more than last time. We had a great chat about Leopard and WWDC, and then talked about the iPhone (3 of us had stood in line to get one).

Our meeting time is now the 2nd Wednesday of every month, so the next CocoaHeads Portland meeting is August 8th at 6pm in downtown Portland. I had a few people volunteer to potentially do small presentations, which is an awesome thing – community building at its best when members want to teach and show other members. It makes me very happy.

I also encourage you to join our Google Group to keep up to date with meeting announcements: http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-cocoaheads

The interesting part in my eye is that it’s written in Python and calling Cocoa. I’ve never used Python, but I hear there is a lot more built in support for this in Leopard.

Having worked on Quicken for 3 years and QuickBooks for 3 years, I’m always interested in new entries into this market. In my opinion Intuit never fully supported their Macintosh products, and any new entries like this help Apple and help the Macintosh ecosystem.

I’m still looking at the new entrants into the personal finance market, to replace Quicken.. I’m frustrated with continually giving my money to Intuit without getting something new and exciting in return.

Wil Shipley, Daniel Jalkut, and Gus Mueller all gave short presentations on different topics about being an independent Macintosh developer, and then they were joined by Brent Simmons for a long Q & A session where they took questions from the crowd.

They all did a great job. Gus talk about the various things you need to do to stay focused during the day, because, well, it’s only you. Daniel talked about payment processing, which in my mind seems to be the hardest part when one is actually ready to start charging people to use your app. Wil talked about hype.

Tidbits that are good to remember:

• Give out eval copies to people who want to review it. If they sell one copy, you are ahead.

• Give free copies to anyone with an apple.com email address. Really because these people are the Macintosh’s biggest fans, and they’ll push your app when people ask for a suggestion.

• Work on a great product that people want to use – don’t worry yet about a company or marketing.

• Do your own leaks – consider giving an exclusive to a rumor site, which a TON of people read.

• Watch your weblog traffic, see where traffic is coming from and keep track of it (regarding the last tidbit)

• Advertise on the Google search network, not on the Google content network.

• Have a thick skin. Always apologize to your customers.

When I remember more, I’ll try and post them.. it was well worth the no dinner until after the talk. (Which, well, hasn’t arrived yet in my hotel room).

Oh – on my way back up to the hotel room another guy who went to the meeting was in my elevator.. I asked him what he though, and he said “it was great, but I don’t want to give up my day job”. I laughed and said ya, but perhaps it will inspire us who have day jobs.

I’ll be doing a short presentation on NSViewAnimation – a general overview of how it works, what it might be useful for, and then walking through a small example program. I’ll provide the source if you want to bring a laptop and try it out. We might have a last minute change of presenters, so stay tuned to here or the official page for more info.

We start at 6pm. Come early for pizza at 5:45pm.

Update:

It went pretty well I thought. We had a decent turnout, good for the first one in like 9 months.

Here’s my presentation and example source:

Presentation – Keynote

Presentation – PDF

NSViewAnimationDemo

Ten Years (And Counting)

(Via ~stevenf.)

(Via Theobroma Cacao.)

Well worth reading, it’s probably the best I’ve read on MacHeist so far.

Go listen, it’s a good interview.

Update: They slam QB Online right at the end for not supporting any browser but IE 6. Fair shot for sure.

Scott Thompson, lead CocoaDev of MindManager on CocoaRadio:

If you are a mind-mapping addict or business switcher, you’re going to enjoy this interview with Scott. He is a former developer on Macromedia Freehand with a great story to share about a company doing things right on the Mac. Mindjet didn’t just port their Windows app (thank you!) as Scott explains, but intentionally set out to create a solid Cocoa app and true Mac experience. Simple logic other software companies should adopt!
Previous post about MindManager beta is here.

Knowing that many non-iTunes PC users don’t care for AAC files, I’ve encoded this show as mp3. I’m just too busy or lazy to add pictures in Garageband too.

Direct download: mp3  or subscribe already via iTunes

(Via CocoaRadio.)

Quick Stuff:

I am not quoted in it. I think I was on vacation when they asked for quotes, or they forgot about asking me cause I’m remote.

However, Peggy’s very nice comment about one of the features I wrote last year is pretty cool:

“It’s really a beautiful thing,” says Chang, “to have this as an automatic process in the background. It’s a major benefit for customers who no longer have to copy and paste.”

My favourite thing that we have right now is our build machine stuff, coded by Chad. It sounds easy, but it’s very powerful (although not as powerful as the Newton build farm, but we’ll get there):

The list of Mac-only benefits in QuickBooks for Mac goes on. Here’s a final example: have you ever considered using iChat in your build process? Probably not. But the team creating QuickBooks for Mac did, and they’ve found it to be a useful tool. Here’s what they do. The build server is on the iChat buddy list for the team. An AppleScript process on the server checks for incoming iChat messages. When someone on the team sends a message (any message – “Hey there!”), the server automatically starts the build. The server then uses iChat status messages to reflect the status of the build—in process, complete, and so on. The team can easily keep track of what’s going wherever they are—in a meeting, in a cubicle, or in the Intuit cafeteria.

In any case, if anyone has any technical questions on what we’ve done, feel free to post a comment, and I’ll try to reply.

And go read Keith’s blog, he’s another developer on the team. Far more technical elegant in his blog than I.

Given Buzz’s situation (which is smart in my mind), I’m not going to blog a lot about the inner workings of how this years development went. Things can always be better, and it’s always easier to remember the bad stuff vs remembering the good stuff. This year was hard but worth the effort.

I’m also looking forward to hearing feedback at MacWorld, as well at http://www.quickbooksgroup.com/. Those forums have been great, as I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed, and when I’m too busy to try and reply, at least I can keep up with the readings of the postings.

Hopefully things can get back to normal in my life now, get caught up on homework and chores around the house, and some picture taking and posting.

“Longtime Mac developer Marshall Clow is blogging his transition from CodeWarrior to Xcode; great perspective on the differences in both UI and compiler output.”

(Via Daring Fireball Linked List.)

Which one are we using, do you ask? UnitKit. Written by James Duncan Davidson, here in Portland. (Who I am a bit jealous of, because he just bought a loft in The Edge).

I wasn’t really sure how it would work for us, because a lot of our app really isn’t separated into model layers that we could test easily without a file open.. but my coworker wrote some code to easily open and close a file, and we’re in business now writing unit tests that depend upon files.

I had modified UnitKit 1.1 to be an embeddable framework, and wrote a little progress UI in cocoa to have the semblance of a ‘green’ progress bar to indicate success. It looks like James has made an embeddable framework with the early beta release of 2.0 – I need to spend some time looking at it, and incorporate it back into our project.

The best part about unit testing? It’s the small successes.. it reminded me of when I worked at Excite@Home, my last 8 months was working on classifieds.excite.com (classifieds2000.com).. the turn around for a web project their was two or three weeks, and really gave you that feeling of victory.. (vs a yearly release cycle).. With unit testing, I can write unit tests, then some code that passes them, and bang, I’ve just got a little victory under my belt.

That, plus it’s nice to know at any point in the future, I can run the unit tests, and see if the code I’ve been writing has broken in any way. Which.. I guess is the obvious benifit is the latter.

If you haven’t tried unit testing, or have a bit project that you don’t seem to get anywhere with, I highly recommend trying it, and check out UnitKit.. it seems to be the most Mac like and Cocoa like of the unit testing frameworks I looked at.

Where have I been? Busy with life, and really busy with work, currently working on another wiz bang feature for next years release.

Problem is, me, Mr. Guilt Trip, I’ve been beating myself up because I haven’t had time to do much (although I have been slowly working on a small task in Adium).

I learned something though, from a member of the Camino team:

It’s an open-source project so you are the boss of what you do.

That’s good for me to keep this in mind, so I don’t feel bad if I don’t get to something on a particular night, because something else came first.

Both are great projects though, and deserve your support in anyway possible.

I don’t have a web page setup yet, nor an email address for questions. Until then, please post comments to this entry, and I’ll reply as soon as possible.

I need to start doing a bit more here. By next Saturday, I am going to have up a software page, and am going to release my Address book plug in that does maps on Yahoo. If you’d like to beta test it this coming week, please leave me a comment here.

Re-reading some Tiger documentation, it’s getting my mind going about potential ideas.. I need to pick one and do it, like Buzz’s Cocoal.icio.us. Hopefully I’ll get the gumption up enough to actually do it, and not just watch tv all winter (thankfully so far tv has been pretty crappy).

Yikes! I’m glad Intuit doesn’t have anything like that set up (although I don’t know the benefits of what they are doing, I haven’t studied the Windows version of Money recently.