Today FileMaker, a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple, best known for its professional database products, entered the indie software market. Or at least, that’s what their new public beta, Bento, reminds me a lot of. It diverges from Apple style by showing all its warts in a public beta: a sort of clunky-yet-intriguing interface design, […]

Another Iron Coder weekend is wrapped up officially, as this round’s judge Jon Wight announced on the Iron Coder Blog. Ben Gottlieb won with his WikiPath screensaver. Congratulations, Ben! My entry received an honorable mention as the “Best Non-Screensaver.” I thought everybody would do a screensaver, and I should try to be a little different. […]

In the first part of this series, Triage, I talked about some of the earliest steps I took in the process of purchasing a Cocoa-Java application and porting it to Objective C. In this article, I’ll discuss some techniques I stumbled upon for working with a legacy Java code base while gradually migrating functionality to […]

I’m working on an application now that uses a custom document format. Since my code manipulates this format and spits it back out to disk, I find myself frequently examining the resulting documents using Peter Ammon’s excellent Hex Fiend to examine the resulting files, and make sure the content is still format-compliant. But while I’m […]