Sunday, April 17th, 2005
However I did add one last new feature today- the ability to link to a specific page in another VoodooPad document. This has been asked for quite a bit, so I'm happy to knock that one off. And two days ago I reworked the preferences window so it no longer looks like it was designed by a drunk Windows programmer. Now it looks like a drunk Mac programmer made it.
Ba dum chink.
So what did I do yesterday? Why I'm glad you asked. I finally used Cocoa Bindings in an app. Yes, that's right- I had yet to actually use them in anything. Very very very cool tech. I had done some of the tutorials but it never really sunk in for me till last night.
Of course, what was I working on?
A little over four years ago when I was working on pc's for my day job at m1, there was a little piece of software that I loved and when it was taken away from me (I quit the job) I felt like I had lost something really cool, really useful. I had always thought about writing a version of it for the Mac, but it seemed that there was a bit of image processing involved that was way out of my league. Earlier this week for some reason I was thinking of it again, and about how to solve the problem from a different point of view, and I had an Aha! moment. So I built a really quick and dirty prototype and instantly fell in love with the idea again.
I sent a couple of emails to my friend George Codillo, bouncing some ideas off him and getting a couple of graphics back (he's pretty good at the artsy stuff). Friday I was feeling sick, so I got to stay at home from the day job and I worked on it a little, and yesterday I was absolutely consumed by it. I got the main part of it done, and then I had to work on the configuration panel and that's where the bindings came in.
I had already spent too much time making the ui and syncing up the table view with the fields that you edit... and I was missing stuff and it was just stupid. So that is where the bindings code came in. Click drag, click drag, delete some code- bam. It all worked perfectly. Super awesome.
So what is this little program? Well, I'm not going to tell you yet- but I think I'm going to release a build of it on the 29th along with Tiger. I've got to clean it up a little bit (which shouldn't take much time) but it's mostly good to go for a rough draft. I'm thinking that I want to make it an official product eventually- after I finish FlySketch 1.1 (which is after VP2.1)... I know, the suspense is killing you, right? Don't get too excited- it's not for everyone... so it might not be for you, and I'd hate for you to be let down. But I can't help talking about it.
But wait- there's just one more thing!
But I can't tell you about that one either for about a week. I know, I suck. But I'll give a hint: 3649 + 6640.
I really just like teasing you, that's all.
-- posted 9:25 pm