macOS What have you developed?

I've developed an addiction to MR. That's about the extent of my development skills.

I think the prize should go to MJ for that Auto-forumspammer™ he's created.

That's a great little app btw Gekko! I love the transparency.

gekko513 said:

What have you developed?

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A nasty rash

See my sig I only write Mac software as a hobby. My day job is writing internal financial apps at Citigroup.

I've written two programs that are publicly available. They are both available at my website. Of the two, BeerAlchemy is by far the more complex and I'm pretty proud of it. The other program still pulls in the odd sale so I keep it on the website more for nostalgia than anything else....

Oh, BTW, I'm not a full time dev. In my day job I work as a research medicinal chemist for a small biotech.

Our first two apps will be released later this summer. I started a company in June 2005. Check out http://www.coachstat.com. This is a "holder" site while the new one is being designed. The Baseball app grew from an idea (No Mac app like it) to a hobbie, to incorporation and all the crap red-tape involved withTHAT. Quite a journey considering I have a REAL job. My partner works for NSA (yes, THAT NSA!) and lives 800 miles from me. We develop using my iDisk to transfer files.

i did commercial development at my last job. nothing you could get off the shelf, though. i worked for a company called 'creative education institute'. we wrote software for education, primarily to bring kids up to their grade level's expectations. i got to lead develop a couple of the titles we distributed, but none of the 'flagship' products. i also did a lot of prototyping for upcoming projects. there were a couple of guys that were *really* good, so they got the big stuff.

it was cool, though. to see my first commercially distributed CD going out was pretty rewarding. if you went to the 'about' menu, there it was: Lead Developer: Thom Edwards.

The only thing I've built so far is my Calculon calculator widget. I think it's pretty good, although there's a minor problem with float inaccuracies that is going to force me to rewrite the way calculations are done.

(for example, if you enter "99.9 - 88.8" the answer SHOULD be "11.1"... but it spits out "11.100000000000009". I think I know what to do to fix it - I just need to find the time to actually do it.)

My day job is web design/HTML geek... but I enjoy the development side of things and want to pick up more programming skills.

gekko513 said:

...Good luck with your rash, mpw.

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Cheers, I'm hoping to add welts in 'rash 2.0™'

I have my own software company and write stuff for that, but lately I haven't had any time for it and am doing full time Mac development for a company in California (I'm in Ohio!). They want me to move out there, we'll see (still in college so it's tricky)

I also am doing boring .NET stuff for a local company as an internship, but I'm seriously considering quitting that since I'd much rather do Cocoa but it's good experience with more "real" world stuff that IT companies do, although it's extremely boring. I need input on this. Should I quit it and do what I love, or keep it since it's good experience but boring (people always tell you to do what you love...)?

But yeah, 99% of the development work I do on the Mac is iPod related

atari1356 said:

The only thing I've built so far is my Calculon calculator widget. I think it's pretty good, although there's a minor problem with float inaccuracies that is going to force me to rewrite the way calculations are done.

(for example, if you enter "99.9 - 88.8" the answer SHOULD be "11.1"... but it spits out "11.100000000000009". I think I know what to do to fix it - I just need to find the time to actually do it.)

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Use round functions?

kainjow said:

I need input on this. Should I quit it and do what I love, or keep it since it's good experience but boring (people always tell you to do what you love...)?

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Quit and do what you love. Think about it this way: you could spend 10 years of your life doing boring work, getting lots of experience learning things you don't really care about... then be stuck with skills that won't necessarily transfer into doing what you really want to do.

... or, you could do something you like doing, learning things that will help you get even better jobs doing what you want to do (or perhaps even start your own business doing what you love). Also, keep in mind that happiness is far more important than money - and that if you like what you're doing, you'll be great at what you do and the money will eventually come (in theory ).

Read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0142196290

kainjow said:

Use round functions?

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I'm not completely sure yet... but that may be part of the solution. It's complicated because I don't want to lose the functionality of being able to enter longer expressions like "4.2+81.63-(6/2)".

I used to maintain an app called MultiDockX -- one of the dozens of dock switchers out there.

I'd like to get back into it some day but other projects are more profitable uses of my time.

One thing I'd like to make is a video player that can play FairPlay videos from iTMS. Watching videos in iTunes is absolutely terrible.

savar said:

One thing I'd like to make is a video player that can play FairPlay videos from iTMS. Watching videos in iTunes is absolutely terrible.

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QuickTime Player?

atari1356 said:

(for example, if you enter "99.9 - 88.8" the answer SHOULD be "11.1"... but it spits out "11.100000000000009". I think I know what to do to fix it - I just need to find the time to actually do it.)

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The reason that happens is because the processor is working in base-2 and you're writing the program in base-10. Some numbers that are non-repeating in base-10 are repeating in base-2.

The answer is not to round, but simply to format numbers appropriately before you display them.

For a better explanation and more solutions, see: http://mindprod.com/jgloss/floatingpoint.html

I'm currently developing a CoreAudio-based audio playback application, and I've also developed some utilities for the obscure Mac MMORPG named Clan Lord. Other than that, a few hundred "test" projects that went nowhere!

The closest I've come to Mac programming is to do some testing of my Java programs on my iMac and iBook to make sure they're ok.

I wrote a client-server-embedded application that has units out in the field collecting information, and relaying that to a server via TCP/IP over cell phone networks, which then displays it to logged in clients. If certain parameters are met, either at the local unit, or at some other unit, then the system can change outputs on units. This is used to control a water system between pumping stations and reservoirs. I wrote the client and server in Java, but only helped with the embedded C. I initially wrote it all on my PC, but when I switched I then made sure it all worked on my Macs.

Then I started working for a company called ICEsoft, on their ICEpdf product, which is a Java PDF viewing library/application. You can use this to embed the ability to view PDFs inside any Java program. I mostly worked on image handling, memory and speed optimisations, supporting newer PDF file format features, and then some annotation and forms viewing. When I got my iBook, I'd bring that into work, and test ICEpdf on it. You can download and try it out for free, without any lame trial period.

Most of my time is now spent on integrating ICEfaces with Facelets, which are technologies for doing JSF web applications. ICEfaces adds a lot of AJAX functionality, and Facelets is a way of doing that without JSP. I've ran my code on my iBook in Tomcat 5.5.x, and tested the resulting web pages on Safari and Firefox. Right now we're gearing up for our Community Edition 1.0 release, in time for JavaOne. The software is free, even for commercial use, so you can download the existing Beta, or just wait for the official 1.0 release in less than 2 weeks.

A bunch of the guys here at work use Macs, but of course we also run things on Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc.

kainjow said:

QuickTime Player?

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No playlists!

Favorites though in QuickTime; that's what I use.
-Chasen

what about....

savar said:

No playlists!

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VLC?

gekko513 said:

As for myself, I've only made Solitaire XL, but I hope to be able to develop more later on. Mac programming is only a hobby for me.

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Cool! My girlfriend is addicted to that game! It is pretty nice.

My most significant development projects are most work related...and not very interesting.

I currently have one released program, MassReplaceIt. It's a bulk find and replace tool for filenames and contents, which I've developed in my spare time over the last couple of years.

gekko513 said:

Since some regulars here seem to be seasoned programmers I'm curious as to which Mac applications or projects you others have developed or been heavily involved in the development of.

Does anyone here develop software for the Mac as a full time job?


As for myself, I've only made Solitaire XL, but I hope to be able to develop more later on. Mac programming is only a hobby for me.

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I've made a Tetris Clone, and a Frogger clone. --see http://www.aaroncox.net/ that's where I learned how to make them.

gekko513 said:

BeerAlchemy looks fun and very professional. If I ever get into beer brewing ...

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Thanks. You should try it (brewing) Beer's pretty expensive in Norway isn't it?. Is homebrewing legal there?

Of course, if you'd like to try BeerAlchemy and maybe buy a license......