*Coder Blog

For some reason, I’ve found 0 time to blog recently, so it’s time to play catch-up.

Gus moved to the West Coast and is settling into his new place. Congrats to Gus and Kirstin on the move.

Brent has been posting his thoughts on Apple’s interface design in Tiger. I’m sure you’ve probably seen links [...]

Dashboard Widgets has finally opened the voting for their Mac Mini Contest. Check out the widgets on their site and vote for your favorite.

If you think Dash Monitors is cool, vote for it here!

Philippe Martin released DesktopSweeper 1.2 a few days ago. I’ve mentioned this app many times on this blog, and find that it is very useful to keep my desktop clear of the multitude of icons that manage to get dropped there.

Congrats on the release Philippe!

Dash Monitors 1.2 was released this morning. I think this release is a lot nicer than version 1.1, and it’s the first release that is considered “final.” If you are running Tiger, be sure to check it out.

I just wanted to extend an invitation to any Mac developers planning to attend WWDC this year. A group of people on the MacSB (Mac Software Business) mailing list are planning to meet at WWDC for an informal discussion about topics that relate to owning a Mac software business. This page lists some [...]

In preparation for a Dash Monitors 1.2 release tomorrow, I’ve released MTK 1.0 this afternoon. Dash Monitors 1.2 will get all of it’s statistics from the MTK app and plugins, and so far it’s working great on my machine here.

I’m hoping to get some developer docs written soon, so people can write their own [...]

I’ve been spending some time working on Dash Monitors 1.2. I changed the interface to make the widget smaller than the current version and polished it’s look a bit. I’ve also been spending some time optimizing redraw time. Dash Monitors 1.1 uses canvases to draw most of the monitors with Quartz-type routines. [...]

One subtle detail that I noticed in Tiger yesterday is that the active window now has a deeper shadow than inactive windows. It’s a small change, but it does make it easier to pick out the active window instead of just having to look for the window with colored buttons in the title bar. [...]

This post on MacDevCenter shows a cool dictionary feature of Tiger that I didn’t know about. Looks like it only works in NSTextViews (or WebViews), but since most apps use them it looks like it will be pretty handy. Hopefully apps like Word will add a capability like this in the future.

Looks like even Google isn’t perfect. Check out this screenshot Rich Wareham took when he came across an internal server error while searching on Google. I’ve never seen an error on their site before, so it’s pretty amazing to see this…