The Shape of Everything
A website mostly about Mac stuff, written by August "Gus" Mueller
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April 17, 2005
(This post is from my old, old, super old site. My views have changed over the years, hopefully my writing has improved, and there is now more than a handful of folks reading my site. Enjoy.)

Sunday, April 17th, 2005

So based on the feedback I got and my own gut feeling, I'm going to go ahead and start to wrap up VoodooPad 2.1 development. I hope to have the first official beta out in a few days.

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