Hosting Issues

Finally got around to switching web hosting providers for Chimoosoft.com away from Yahoo.  Although Yahoo has been very reliable and hassle free over the years, there were several big drawbacks to it: FTP access only (no SFTP), an older version of PHP, no web statistics for PHP pages (even though they were supposed to be available), no SVN hosting, no Ruby on Rails support, no terminal access, etc..  

Our new hosting provider is Webfaction which has much more customizability and should help Chimoosoft.com evolve into a more fully featured site.  During the transition process, the domain temporarily pointed at nothing Sunday morning for a few hours; if you were directed to a temporary Go Daddy parking page, now you know why.  Email may also have bounced back to you, so please try sending it again.  Sorry for the trouble - note that this is Chimoosoft's first hosting provider change in about five years, so this doesn't happen too often!

If you're curious about Webfaction - so far, so good.  I'll post more information about the provider as time passes.  Go Daddy seems to have worked fine, but the site was incredibly confusing and poorly laid out (IMHO) - pretty much the opposite of Apple's clean design principles!

PS: If you get tempted by webfaction, signing up through this link will give Chimoosoft a bonus!

Cocoa Foot Dipping

In my ramblings about the internet today I came across Andy Matuschak's gentle introduction to Cocoa entitled "Getting Started with Cocoa: A Friendlier Approach."  I have to say I was fairly impressed with his friendlier approach and wished it was available all those years ago when I was first learning Cocoa.  To any of you out there considering diving in, why not get your feet wet with Andy's introduction?  What a perfect way to spend your holiday vacation time!

A quote from the article:

Now, don’t let this scare you, but I’m going to just come out and say it: Cocoa is huge. It consists of a great number of frameworks that can accomplish just about anything you need in application development. 

So any attempt to “learn Cocoa” is going to result in disappointment. We’ve just got to get you on your feet and show you how to find answers. We’ve got to give you a Cocoa intuition. I have no idea how to use Bonjour, for instance, but I’m sure I could use it in an app today if I wanted to. That’s what we’re aiming for.

Cocoa Delegates

I came across a couple of interesting articles about using delegates in Cocoa which may be of interest to those of you with some software design background.

• Delegating Authority - Cocoa Delegation and Notification (from stepwise)
• Extend with Delegates (from Cocoa Dev Central)

The way delegation is used in Cocoa is one of my favorite aspects of programming in this environment; subclass only when really necessary.

Addendum: This article from Apple is also of interest regarding delegates.

Apple Style Guidelines

It's encouraging to see that Apple has standard style guidelines which developers are supposed to apply to their software.  I came across this while reading through the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

The Apple Publications Style Guide covers style and usage issues, and is the key reference for how Apple uses language. This document is available in the User Experience Reference Library; consult it whenever you have a question about the preferred style of particular terms. For issues that aren’t covered in the Apple Publications Style Guide, Apple recommends three other works: The American Heritage Dictionary,The Chicago Manual of Style, and Words Into Type. When these books give conflicting rules, The Chicago Manual of Style takes precedence for questions of usage andThe American Heritage Dictionary for questions of spelling.

Flickr

The new Chimoosoft Flickr page is now active!  Head on over to view photos from the Apple 2007 World Wide Developer's Conference in San Francisco.

Apple Developer Humor

While coding today, I was playing around with NSAlert and created an alert with an empty message.  I was fairly amused to see the following logged to my console when running the alert.

-[NSAlert alertWithError:] called with nil NSError.  A generic error message will be displayed, but the user deserves better.

;-)

New Blog for Chimoosoft

I finally decided to create a Chimoosoft blog since it's much easier to post quick notes using blogging tools than editing HTML by hand and uploading it.  Old news articles from the main Chimoosoft site will be migrated to this blog, so entries appearing prior to this one are migrated entries.