Sexy Swing Apps on Mac OS X
A few months ago I stumbled upon what came to be one of the most interesting Swing blogs I’ve ever read. Actually, it is the most interesting Swing blog I know of. Exploding Pixels, by Ken Orr, shows how to create beautiful looking Swing applications for Mac OS X. Ken has a great sense of [...]
NewsFire for Free
David Watanabe just decided to release NewsFire free of charge for Mac OS X. NewsFire is my favorite RSS client: simple, clean and good looking.
.Mac Now With 10GB
Following today’s event, Apple just published the announcement of an update to .Mac, their web-based storage and sharing solution. Previously limited to 1 GB of data, including email and WebDAV, .Mac now offers 10 GB of storage. I am very excited about this announcement as it will make .Mac even more useful to me. I [...]
Improving Groovy Console’s GUI
Groovy is a very appealing language that I really enjoy using from time to time. Unfortunately, as many other languages, Groovy lacks decent development environments. Even though this shortcoming is being addressed by the Eclipse and IntelliJ, the Groovy Console remains a valuable tool to quickly test an expression or a script. The console works [...]
This, Is Why I Love Mac OS X
You have probably read about it by now, but Coda is a wonderful new web development environment for Mac OS X. While it is not revolutionary, Coda is a simple yet powerful tool encased in a beautiful user interface. Because it relies on http://Transmit for FTP and SubEthaEdit for code editing (with collaborative support), this [...]
Translucent Swing Windows on Mac OS X
Many people have complained over the years (I know I did) about the lack of support in Swing/AWT for translucent and non-rectangular windows. There are various solutions to that problem. Mac OS X in particular, makes it easy to create translucent windows without calling into native code. I have often seen that the solution is [...]
A Swing User Interface
Today is a great day… I am done with school! I will finally get my M.S. in Computer Science. Today was also the day we finished our final assignment. Our goal was to write some sort of a component-oriented/network-distributed VNC clone. I ended up in charge of the UI that I had to crank out [...]
Quartz Composer and Dashboard Widgets
The Apple Developer Connection just published my article about using Quartz Composer compositions in Dashboard widgets. The example widget displays Flickr’s most interesting photos of the past 7 days one by one, playing a nice animated transition between each.
Cocoa Development Tools
Whenever I have some spare time, I continue my exploration of Cocoa/Objective-C development. Lately, there’s been a few blogs telling the world how vastly superior Cocoa is to Swing. Cocoa is a fine toolkit and some APIs are wonderful but there are things, aside from having to maintain those stupid .h files, that I find [...]
Delicious Library Gambler's Sale
Delicious Monster's Delicious Library is currently available for $20. The catch is there are a limited number of licenses. If you want to experience one of the best applications I have used, here is your chance. Not all of you will need it but if, like me, you own hundreds and hundreds of books (or [...]
Quartz Composer, Next
While on the plane I decided to start learning Quartz Composer and this application is even better than I thought at first. As a reminder, Quarte Composer is a developer application you can install on MacOS X 10.4 along with Xcode 2.0. It is located in /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools. This folder also contains the wonderful Core [...]
I Love Quartz Composer
I installed Apple’s Tiger friday and I did not have a lot of time to test it so far. Yet, I found a really cool application shipped with Xcode 2.0, Quartz Composer. You can use it to create scenes with Quartz (hence the name I guess :). In just a few click you can create [...]
Delicious Library
Sometimes, I stumble upon a nice and lovely application. Delicious Library is one of that kind. Available for MacOS X only, Delicious Library provides an efficient and appealing user interface to take care of your media items. You can use it to catalog and browse your CDs, DVDs, books and video games. If, like me, [...]
