Things I find on other sites that I want to link to will be found in this category.
While going through my Pocket backlog I read quite a few excellent blog posts that I had saved for later. If you haven’t checked these out yet, I highly recommend taking a few moments to do so.
You Need an MVP by Michael Jurewitz
Focus on the User by Michael Jurewitz
And lastly, a more technical entry, Designing for iOS: Blending modes by Gordon Fontenot
The WWDC 2012 Photo Walk sponsored by 500px was a huge success! We had an incredible turnout that, quite honestly, blew me away.
As a last minute surprise we had the fine folks from Speck come out to demonstrate their upcoming CandyShell Focus case for iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. To cap it all off they handed out a bunch of them to the attendees. I’ve had mine on my phone since the walk and I love it. I’ll admit I don’t do too much photography with my phone, but I have found myself using the stand for FaceTime calls and just for standing up the phone on my desk. If you’d like more info on it you should get in touch with Erica on Twitter @2bmighty, and tell her @MrRooni sent you. (Not for any good reason, but let’s be honest, it’s just fun to end a sentence with, “tell them I sent you”)
We also had the guys from MacPhun show up and very generously offer a free license to their new photography product, Snapheal, to everyone who attended. If you went on the walk and you’d like a copy of Snapheal just send an email to me (michael [at] this domain) and Alex Tsepko (atsepko [at] macphun) with your favorite photo from the walk. I haven’t actually had a chance to try it out yet, but I heard from a few people on the walk that use MacPhun’s other photography products and love them.
As you know, for those that participated in the walk, the editors at 500px are going to choose their two favorite photographs from the walk and upgrade those photographer’s accounts to Plus and Awesome. All you have to do is upload your photos to your 500px account and tag the photos with the tag wwdc-photowalk. The last day to upload your best shots for a chance to get your account upgraded is Thursday, June 21st TODAY. You can find my shots in a set on 500px here: WWDC 2012 Photo Walk sponsored by 500px. If you’d like to see all my photos from WWDC you can find them here: WWDC 2012
I know I mentioned it above, but we really did have a great turnout. So good in fact, that people are already asking me to organize one for next year. To that end I’ve created a new Twitter account dedicated to the walk: @WWDCPhotoWalk. You should follow that account for any and all info on the next walk.
Thank you to everyone who came out, you all exceeded my expectations, and I’ll see you next year.
If you’re going to be in San Francisco during WWDC make sure you check out the Definitive WWDC’12 Party & Event List over on macindie.com. These guys really stay on top of everything that’s happening during the week and it’s a great resource for keeping up with the myriad events. You should pay particular attention to Wednesday, it looks like someone scheduled an awesome photography-related event.
My good friend Dave Verwer has taken it upon himself to keep the iOS development community informed of the latest and greatest happenings, one weekly newsletter at a time.
Each newsletter is concise, easily digestible, and always contains at least one link that I want to read. If you’re not already subscribed you should head over to iosdevweekly.com, put your email address in the box, and click Subscribe.
My friend Mike has come up with another gem of a tip, head on over to his blog to see how easy it is to create NSTextFields with an etched appearance: “Etched” appearance labels
A few days ago I started using Dash to view developer documentation. I was immediately blown away by how insanely fast it was. It has quickly become my go-to app for searching and reading documentation. Today I found myself wishing it had better Xcode integration so I checked if the Dash developers had included a system service.
The forward-thinking developers of Dash included a system service, huzzah!
Success! Now I can simply highlight something in Xcode, hit control+command+L and have it brought it up in Dash.
If you haven’t gotten Dash yet, go get it, it’s awesome.
By the way, did you see what I did with the title there? Pretty clever, huh?
As I have neglected to post the second in my series on Cocoa drawing I’d like to point you to 365Cocoa for their next few posts starting with the one linked below. It sounds like they are going to go down the path I intended (and will probably do it better than I could have). Enjoy!
Many congrats to everyone who participated in Indie+Relief. Over $143,872 was raised for the people of Haiti through various charities!
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.
* 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.
For those that may not have heard, Justin Williams has organized a great effort to provide financial relief to the people of Haiti. Set to take place throughout the day on January 20th, all the proceeds from the sale of participating software will be donated to Haiti. We here at No Thirst Software are participating with sales of MoneyWell and Debt Quencher. For a full list of participating software please check out the Indie+Relief website.
It’s a great cause and I know that I will be checking the list for software that’s on my “to buy” list. I suggest that you do the same.