Something that’s always been a bit of a hack in Mac OS X Leopard is settings your application to launch at login per a user preference. Prior to Leopard it involved open the user’s loginwindow.plist file and manually adding/removing it from there or using Apple’s System Events sample. Luckily with Leopard, Apple has offered a […]
Continue reading Adding an application to Login Items in Mac OS X Leopard...
I’ve been working on a pretty large OS X development project for the past few weeks. With any large project, some source code files can become pretty insane with the amount of methods and code in general. I try to adhere to a set of best practices for organizing my code. I’ve outlined my organization […]
In a perfect world of client software development, you would have a full blueprint for the software you are developing and the client would never want to modify that blueprint. Sadly, the world is not perfect. A client recently came to me late in a project wanting to add two data fields to a project […]
It’s been a few weeks and I am starting to feel like writing about some polish. In our last installment of Mac Polish we discussed what constitutes a good toolbar for a Mac application. In summary: Hire a professional icon designer Use illustrative imagery Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery Today I want to […]
In our last journey down the polishing road, I outlined what Mac polish was: Excellent UI design Drag-and-drop Keyboard access Authentic Apple Help (ie. using Help Viewer) Other little things that are always overlooked (like setting a table cell editable on insertion) I gave a few examples of these with Flying Meat Software’s VoodooPad. I […]
As I mentioned in the previous post, I posted a reveiew of the digital video management application FrameVault. To sum up the review, I said the application worked as described, but that it had almost no “Mac Polish.” to it. What is Mac Polish? Here’s a few examples: Excellent UI design Drag-and-drop Keyboard access Authentic […]
Hi. I'm Justin Williams and this is my weblog. I am the crew chief of Second Gear, a purveyor of fine Macintosh and iPhone software.
You can learn more about me or view my résumé
In addition to this site I am frequently posting thoughts on Twitter, photos on Flickr and everything else to Tumblr.
