mattpat.net

Alright, I’ll admit it: I’m working on a book.

Nothing all that exciting, more of a mini-book, and only to be distributed (for free) online, but I felt that I finally understand Cocoa well enough to take a stab at explaining it to others. Laurent will be doing all the print design for it, and we’ll be releasing it under our new {13bold} label.

Anyway, I finished some excellent memory usage enhancements on Architect tonight, and it inspired me to write Chapter 3: Memory Management in Cocoa. I was so proud of the thorough job I did on it that I felt like releasing it.

Be on the lookout for more on this mini-book later in the year!

EDIT: After an interesting conversation with Bill Bumgarner (@bbum) of PyObjC via Twitter, I may have to rethink, or at least qualify, my position on Garbage Collection, and also fix a few things in my discussion of autorelease. An errata will be posted shortly. Thanks, Bill!

Bowtie’s search feature has only been demonstrated via video thus far — few people have actually had the opportunity to use it. But just about everyone who’s seen it has had one question: how is it so fast?

Every major iTunes controller on the market does searching essentially the same way, and they’re all bloated, buggy, and most importantly, SLOW. In fact, this was one of the reasons I originally decided to omit searching from Bowtie entirely. Then I came up with an idea, based on what I’d done for fast searching over the network with TuneConnect. It’s called PowerSearch: it’s fast, powerful, and it blows everyone else’s search out of the water. And here’s why. (more...)

On a whim yesterday, in order to satisfy the numerous people who kept on asking me for a beta copy of Bowtie, I posted my latest build to the Bowtie website, with a link on the running MacThemes thread about the app.

You can imagine that I was a little surprised when I looked at the stats as they started rolling in via Mint. I’ve had some pretty decent download turnouts before, but never approaching 2,000 downloads and 4,000 website hits in well under the first 24 hours.

So needless to say, the app, though still in first beta, has been a relative success, especially thanks to Laurent’s Bowtie Theme Starter Pack, which... (more...)

So I’ve been kicking around a few ideas for apps that I’ve always kind of wanted. Thought I’d take this opportunity to share my thoughts, see if anyone would be interested in any of them.

• Bowtie: this one sort of doesn’t count, since I’m already working on it, though I would like to devote more time to it.
• Imagine: an actually usable Cocoa disk image creation app. This would be a replacement for FileStorm by MindVision, which is pitifully outdated and expensive.
• MobileYou: the state of webmail depresses me. I’d love a sexy webmail client, that plays nicely with iPhone. Maybe throw in iCal support, but mail would be enough for me.
• WebGUI: needs a better name, but I... (more...)

Just thought I’d let you all know that our company, Slightly Pretentious Software, has just published a teaser page for one of our upcoming products, Architect, with a beta to follow next week. Check it out, be impressed.