BlueRope

In the last few weeks, there was a lot going around about Core Data and why it may or may not be a good idea. There was Matt Gallagher’s post: The differences between Core Data and a Database. Then Brent Simmons kicked off a whole slew of other posts with On switching away from Core Data, such as:

• Manton Reece: I don’t use Core Data either
• Gus Mueller doesn’t like it’s smell

There are others as well. I was dying to post about this but was even more determined to get my first release out the door. Now that that’s done, I figured I’d share my thoughts. more »

Although I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks, I haven’t been slacking. I’m pleased to announce my first app: CrankTunes. more »

Last weekend I went looking for a way to duplicate the functionality of Safari’s search field. This began an epic journey that has nearly killed me…hopefully it’s true what they say and I’m stronger for it. more »

One of the applications I’m working on gets songs from iTunes and plays them. It doesn’t use iTunes to play the music, but just to locate them. The playing is left to NSSound. This all works fine…except when it doesn’t more »

I made a few updates for DocBase: a configuration file for a document database and a migrator to handle configuration changes. Read on for a few details. more »

Automated unit tests can be incredibly awesome and incredibly frustrating. Sometimes, in order to write a unit test you’re forced to design your code in such a way as to make the test feasible to write. Often this is a good thing (even though it’s annoying at the time you realize you need to refactor), but other times its just not practical. In these cases, method replacement might do the trick. more »

So I’ve been neck deep in attempting to make my user interface pretty and simple to use. Anyone who thinks creating effective UIs is easy is either nuts or way smarter than me.

I’ve been going back and forth between using an NSTableView and an NSCollectionView for a list of items, and I think I’m settling on the NSCollectionView, but there are definitely some interesting challenges. more »

I’ve been using BRDocBase fine in development for a few weeks. While it’s nowhere near complete, I haven’t had any real need for new features or performance improvement for my modest needs until now. more »

I spent a little bit of time last weekend looking into ways I can more effectively share code between projects. I’ve gone back and forth on ways to do this and I finally feel satisfied with what I’ve got. more »

Categories in Objective-C can be a great thing. Being able to add methods to a class is a powerful feature. However, one weakness is that those methods only get added to one class. If I want the methods in a category to apply to more than one class, I have to put that category on a subclass. If I want to generic apply the category, I have to put it on NSObject (and then the methods are almost certainly available on classes I don’t really care about). Sometimes it would be nicer if I could choose individual classes that the methods are added to. This is done often in Ruby through the use of modules. more »