New software... And a new web site!
20 March 2008

"The great part is, the Apple framework documentation is...pretty good and apart from needing a few more examples on some pages it allowed me to find the solutions to my problems without losing too many more hairs from my rapidly receding hairline."

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry I've been busy building my first major Apple Mac application and this has now reached its first public beta version.

This isn't my first Mac software, of course, as my TV listings widget for OS X's Dashboard has been a popular download since 2006 and last Autumn I released a very simple program that tells you the human equivalent age of your pet dog. However, this latest effort is in a totally different league and, I hope, the start of a successful period producing stand-alone software for the Mac.

If you go back even further, people who have known me for a number of years may remember a program called Jogger. This was something I wrote long before my switch to the Mac platform in the mid 1990's to run on Windows 95. Jogger was an application that popped up a message to remind you of important calendar events. Jogger was followed by the imaginatively named Jogger 2 (around 1998, I think, but time passes so it may have been later than that). This had a new interface and extra features. Of course, these days, this task is more than covered by Apple's iCal and Microsoft's Outlook (although I believe that there is an iCal clone on Windows Vista that may be a better comparison.)

My new program is called Gallery Card Insert Maker and as the name suggests is designed to take the hassle out of creating inserts for home made greetings cards. The first beta is now available for download and I'm looking for interested parties to test the application and feedback bugs and feature requests. On a side note, I'm also interested to hear from anyone with programming ideas. I have some of my own, but I'm open to suggestions.

To coincide with the launch of my new app, I've created a brand new web site for this and all of my future programming efforts. Inspired by my pet dog (a cocker spaniel called Misty) I've named it Blue Roan Software. The web site is now live at www.blueroansoftware.co.uk where you can download Version 1.0 Beta 1 of the card insert program.

The process of writing GCIM has helped to consolidate in my mind some of the new features of Apple's Interface Builder application as well as the nifty new "properties" of Objective C 2. However, I'm sure that there are plenty of things still to learn including (amongst plenty of others) the integration of Core Animation features into an app. No doubt as I continue to develop my software such advanced techniques will find their way into my code. I can't wait!

I don't want to unnecessarily bash Windows at this point, but the whole experience of writing code for OS X has been a good deal less stressful than when I last did the same thing "on the dark side". Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of times during the development of GCIM that I hit a brick wall and had to work hard to get the code to work in the way that I wanted it to. This was inevitable as I'd not written anything using Objective C 2 or Interface Builder 3 before (thankfully, XCode hadn't changed much). The great part is, the Apple framework documentation is (on the whole) pretty good and apart from needing a few more examples on some pages it allowed me to find the solutions to my problems without losing too many more hairs from my rapidly receding hairline.

I look forward to receiving feedback about Gallery Card Insert Maker. Be sure to visit the Blue Roan Software web site to find out all about it.