Downloads
The Awesomeness That Is Bodega
Jan 17th
Let’s get one thing out of the way first thing: I’m a big fan of Bodega and have been since I heard about it firsthand from the guys at centrix.ca during WWDC 2009.
Bodega is a free Mac application that helps you discover and download Mac applications. It is built in the spirit of great software sites like MacUpdate, but takes the experience and puts a great looking Cocoa wrapper around it. Make no mistake, this project is a big undertaking with a lot of moving parts and a lot of coordination between those parts. Yet with steady progress and determination these guys are really crafting something cool.
The impetus for this particular blog post is to gush about what I think is Bodega’s killer feature: keeping track of and installing updates for the applications installed on your computer. I really like Andy Matuschack’s Sparkle framework, but one of the necessary evils of that framework is that it doesn’t notify you that there is an update for a particular app until you run that app. When I launch an application it is done with the intention of performing a task immediately, but if there’s an update for that particular app I am yanked out of my workflow to deal with the question of updating the app first. Yes, I can continue to work, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking about how I don’t have the latest version of the software that I am currently using, and it bugs me.
Enter Bodega. Once every few weeks I will launch Bodega and click on the Applications section in its sidebar which presents me with a list of all the software currently installed on my system*. The killer feature is that Bodega scans all of the Sparkle feeds in these apps and will tell me if there’s an update for any of them. With two clicks (one to download and one to install) I can download and install any of the updates that I want. This simple process greatly reduces the chance that the next time I launch an app I will be presented with the option to download and install an update, Bodega has already taken care of it for me.
If you haven’t downloaded Bodega yet I highly recommend that you do and take it for a spin. If you’re a developer and you haven’t submitted your software to Bodega, I highly recommend that you do that too.
Downloading and installing updates (Stolen shamelessly from the Bodega website)
* Bodega is opt-in for developers, so if a developer hasn’t submitted their software to the Bodega site it won’t know about that software on your computer.
ParseKit
Jul 6th
While I don’t have an immediate need for ParseKit, I’m fairly certain that it’s going to come in very handy in the future. Written by Todd Ditchendorf, the framework offers:
- String Tokenization via the Objective-C PKTokenizer and PKToken classes.
- Language Parsing via Objective-C – An Objective-C parser-building API (the PKParserclass and sublcasses).
- Parser Generation via Grammars – Generate an Objective-C parser for your custom language using a high-level grammar syntax (similar to yacc or ANTLR). While parsing, the parser will provide callbacks to your Objective-C code..
Head on over to the ParseKit website to download it.
UICatalog
Apr 3rd
Reading through Beginning iPhone Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche I came across his handy link to a fantastic piece of iPhone development sample code: UICatalog.
UICatalog is an Xcode project that uses all of the UI elements contained in iPhone’s UIKit framework. There are quite a few great nuggets that this code produces such as:
Typinator and Xcode
Mar 18th
I recently acquired a free license of Typinator through MacHeist and have been loving it. I put together a set of abbreviations for the text macros that Xcode provides and it has made my coding life much easier. A few folks have asked why I’m not using xctxtmacros and the truth is that I didn’t know about them. Either way, Typinator is working great.
You can download my set of Xcode Abbreviations here. Please note that it’s extremely limited as I only included those macros that I need most often. Leave a comment if there are any that you think I’m missing.
cocoaFusion:The new podcast all about Cocoa
Jan 11th
For those of you waiting for the next great thing in Cocoa development podcasts I humbly submit cocoaFusion:.
cocoaFusion: is hosted by Kevin Hoctor of MoneyWell fame, and Danny Greg the lead developer on Realmac Software’s most recent release, LittleSnapper. The pair decided to start a podcast of their own after being introduced on one of Scotty’s excellent Mac Developer Network shows.
The idea behind cocoaFusion: is for each Kevin and Danny to cover a coding problem that they’ve faced down since the last episode. The first episode has Kevin relating his experiences with NSDateFormatter while Danny goes in depth on NSPredicateEditor.
While the pair admits to some rough edges in the first episode, the overall quality of the show’s production and the ease with which Danny and Kevin relate to each other makes for a fantastic show that’s a pleasure to listen to.
cocoaFusion: can be found on the web at cocoafusion.net and in iTunes by following this link.
If you’d like to hear more from Kevin you can read his blog, Entrepreneurial Seduction or follow him on Twitter.
Danny’s musings can be found on his blog at dannygreg.com and also on his Twitter page.
The Mac Developer Roundtable Episode 12: Developer Groups
Sep 22nd
If you’re a fan of Scotty’s podcasts (though who isn’t, I mean really…) and you think you can stand to listen to me and 6 other guys ramble on about developer groups for 1 hour, 34 minutes and 4 seconds head on over to Mac-Developer-Network.com and download the latest episode of The Mac Developer Roundtable.
I was lucky enough to be joined by a great crew of developers: Scotty (of course), Jiva DeVoe, Joe Heck, Paul Kim, Dave Verwer and Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch.
This is my second time recording a podcast with Scotty and I think I did a lot better than my first outing. Hopefully Scotty still feels that I’m a worthwhile guest and I’ll get to polish my skills a bit more in the future.
Bar Harbor, ME: A Screen Saver
Sep 9th
A couple of years ago I whipped up a photo screen saver bundle from some photos that I took while my wife and I were on our second honeymoon. I’ve always meant to release it, but have just not gotten around to whipping up a download page for it or uploading it to MacUpdate or Apple Downloads.
That being said, I’ve decided to provide it here for now, just to get it into a few folks hands and maybe even gather some feedback on it. It’s a doozy of a download (47.3 MB) but it contains 12 high resolution photos in and around Bar Harbor.
Grab it here: BarHarborME.slideSaver.tbz and let me know what you think.
This content is being provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported license.
