Hog Bay Software's content tagged 'Blog'

Bubbles, my new iPhone app

jesse — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:59:59 -0500

For toddlers who need a fun distraction. Bubbles brings the simple pleasure of popping bubbles to your iPhone. Unlike other iPhone games, Bubbles is free entertainment that's fun for little ones on up. Requires iPhone/iPod Touch 2.0 or later.

Please check out the app and the story.

Big trip starts tomorrow...

jesse — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:28:50 -0500

Tomorrow we head off on our big family vacation to Korea and Japan until June 5. I'm excited for the trip, but just a little worried about how Hog Bay Software will hold up while I'm away. I won't have my computer, though I will try to keep up with email as best I can in internet cafe's, etc. I think this should mostly work, but I can see it taking me a few days to get to emails most of the time.

Please help me out if you see any angry posts in these forums from users that I've not responded too. I'll get back to them as soon as I can, and at worst I'm always happy to give a full refund if someone is not satisfied, so just tell them I'll be getting back June 5.

In the meantime things are likely to get pretty quite (from my end anyway) around here for the next month. But I'm just on vacation, will be back in full force in early June. See you all then!

Hog Bay Software interview

jesse — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:19:00 -0500

Here's a recent interview by Arun Kale. If you want to hear more about the Hog Bay Software story check it out.

Learn about plugin architectures

jesse — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:38:57 -0500

Here me ramble about plugin architectures (Programmers only).

Subversion for Writers

jesse — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:37:15 -0500

Subversion for Writers. If you are a writer, and want a better way of versioning your files than saving old copies on your desktop check make sure to check that article out. It's a great step by step introduction to version control, geared to writers on OS X.

(For Programmers) Leopard style tabs

jesse — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:19:44 -0500

I'm looking for some developer help.

Leopard introduced a new "etched" tab style that's used in Safari and in Terminal. I want that look in the next version of TaskPaper, but from what I can tell neither of the open source tab bar projects (SMTabBarControl, HMBlkAppKit) support that look yet. Also those project are both much more complex with dependencies then what I want. And so I've started reinventing the wheel... (Dear apple, really wish I could see your code for this and the rest of your frameworks, would save me tons of time so I could work on my apps actual funcationality)

Here's how this code (free, do whatever you want with it) differs from the other open source tab projects.

Recreate's (attempting to) exact Leopard tab look.
Copy/Paste able. Consists of only two classes and no dependencies.
Simple, just a subclass of NSTabView that you then use normally, no special way of setting things up.
Only focused on simple leopard tabs, not trying to create a generic tabbing framework with themes, etc.
Not done, this is a day of coding by a developer who doesn't do all that much custom views work.

I've put a good day into the code so far. I think I've got the easy 80% complete, but still some issues that I'm hoping some other developers with more custom UI experience can help on. In particular...

How can I use the included mask graphics to correctly draw the highlight for the selected tab? I think core graphics masking is the answer, but my head hurt too much when I tried.
All the lines that I'm drawing are just single pixel dark gray lines, and don't match the etched lines that Apple uses. What is the best way to duplicate that exact effect?
What are the exact settings needed to create "etched" text, I'm close, but not sure if I mine exactly matches what apple uses.

Anyway if you are looking for a simple safari style tabs implementation that looks good in leopard please try this out, and help clean it up or give me some tips on how I can make it better myself.

Here's the current download.

WriteRoom in Washinton Post

jesse — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 06:42:31 -0500

There's an article on WriteRoom in today's Washington Post. Yeah! (Login Required)

TaskPaper progress update...

jesse — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:10:51 -0600

TaskPaper 1.0 was released in October 2007. It was/is a good initial test of an idea (text based GTD tool), but is missing a number of features that I thought were essential. Because of this I've been selling TaskPaper 1.0 at a discounted price of $18.95.

My initial plan was to add those features (mainly plugin and applescript support) and release a 1.1 update sometime in January. Well, it's march now, and it's still at least a month or more away from the next release...

This is for two reasons. First, implementation is always harder then I imagine. Second, the next version has been experiencing a bit of feature creep (the good kind I think) and so it's been a lot more work then I expected. In the end it turns out that this next version is going to be pretty much a complete rewrite of the program. It will also require OS X 10.5 or later. Because of this big changes the next version will be named version 2.0 instead of version 1.1. (Still free upgrade to all existing TaskPaper users)

That's the big picture of where things are. The "today" picture is that I've just seen some great progress on the new text system that I'm building for TaskPaper 2.0. I think it's really cool, will offer you some features that you didn't think were going to be possible with TaskPaper, and in general I hope in the end you'll be happy that the next version of TaskPaper got delayed a few months so that I had time to rethink the problem find a better solution from scratch.

Hype... Hype... I'm hyperventilating with all the hype ;)

Away for the weekend...

jesse — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:59:57 -0600

I won't have solid web/email access again until Monday night. I hope everyone has a good weekend!

TaskPaper sponsored plugins

jesse — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:35:51 -0600

I'm looking for some help writing TaskPaper plugins, and am willing to sponsor their development. The end result will be open sourced and free.

If your comfortable with Objective-c and want to play around with TaskPaper's plugin API please let me know what plugin you are interested in (see below) and how much you'll need to do the work. To start with I just want to select one person, if that's successful longer term I may try to do this more often.

Synch with http://taskodone.com

Taskodone has a simple API and stores it's data in the TaskPaper text format. I think to the best approach is to use standard unix tools (merge maybe?) for synching/merging text files. (tools that I'm not all that familiar with, but hopefully you are, or can learn). The basic idea would be to download the file from taskodone, merge the changes, and send the merged result back to the server and also keep it locally.

Synch with iCal Tasks

I don't have a great idea of how this will work yet, but the basic idea is... lots of people want TaskPaper to synch with iCal... so TaskPaper needs a solution. I recently did a quick 1 hour hack solution that you can start playing with to get some ideas. But I think I used the wrong API. I used the Calendar Store framework, but I think a better solution is to use Synch Services, because that deals with merging changes, while the Calendar Store framework looks to be more for just reading and writing to the store.

If you are interested send me an email, or post in this thread.