Archive for June, 2002

June 20th, 2002

Apple’s Earnings Warning
I just want to chat about Apple’s earnings warnings for a bit. Apple claims the soft profits are because of weak demand in the education and design sectors which is going to lead to less-then-expected profits. Naturally this gave the street the reason to trample all over Apple’s stock price. I believe many of investors are simply looking for a reason to downgrade Apple and this gives them the reason they are looking for. The street doesn’t like markets/companies that aren’t wildly growing, Apple fits that bill. Of course they loved Enron and look where that got them. 🙂

The reason Apple isn’t making a lot of money is simple, I’m sitting on an almost 2 year old dual G4 450 Mhz machine and what do I have to upgrade to? A dual 1 Ghz machine for $3500. In almost 2 years Apple has failed miserably to produce faster machines, which leaves them charging *a lot* for a machine that’s lagging behind its PC counter parts. Many publishing houses are probably in the same boat as I am, I would like to get a faster machine, but I don’t want to spend $3500 to get a *modest* speed increase. If I’m going to drop a lot of money, I want to see something that flies compared to my current machine and so far Apple has failed to produce.

Here’s to hoping something major happens at MacWorld NY, for Apple’s sake and our own.

– Will

# posted at 4:26 pm by Will

June 19th, 2002

Alien Workshop
It’s been a while, but I decided I better post something for visitors to read. 🙂 This Thursday my friend and I are going over to Iowa City (Iowa) to watch a skateboarding demo by Alien Workshop, Habitat and another company that I’m forgetting right now. And yes, I am getting *a bit* old to skateboard, but I still enjoy it time and again. So if anyone happens to read this from the Iowa City area, likes skating, and is going to be at the demo, they can meet one half of ES. 🙂 The odds of that happening are probably worse than…I don’t even want to think about it.

As for ES news, I’ve been taking it easy the last couple weeks since releasing Maquarium, a man needs a break sometimes.

Until later, Will

# posted at 9:22 pm by Will

June 4th, 2002

Maquarium 1.0
I just wanted to talk a little bit about our newest software, Maquarium, and let you know a little bit about it and how it was created.

Maquarium was created in a little over 3 months working around 4-6 hours a day in Cocoa, which saved me a lot of time and energy. Simply put, Cocoa rocks. It has to be the most well developed framework I?ve used, it?s amazing what you can do with it. I?m not going to get into the details, but let me just say that if you want to develop on the Mac, this is what you should be using.

As for motivation for making Maquarium, it was simple; I wanted something to record my aquarium chemical measurements in, and there was nothing for the Mac. I mocked up a very rough UI, sent it to Wade, and said, ?what do you think?? He thought the idea was ok (maybe even good, I don?t recall 🙂 so I started working on it. This entire project has been one big question mark, will people use it? Will people like it? Since no aquarium software exists on the Mac we didn’t have answers for any of these questions, which is always bad considering the amount of time and money I’ve invested into it. I figure we won’t know if it’s a success for some time after it’s been released.

Maquarium was my first full-blown Cocoa app (Wade did most of the work on Bookit, and Show Desktop doesn?t count 🙂 so I had some learning to do. But after the first day, I basically got the hang of Interface Builder and creating controller objects. After about the first month it was more or less running, not saving files or anything fancy, but it would record your data in it?s lovely data structure and fully supported all the data I was interested in.

I contracted PixelPress to create icons for it. The icons turned out fantastic and we were both very pleased with Gary?s work. We put a lot of emphases on interface design, so great icons was a must, even though they put me in the hole. 🙂

Putting the final touches on Maquarium took longer than I expected, but I think it turned out great, and I hope you do too. As for future plans, assuming it?s not a flop, I want to add graphing support for chemical measurements in the next major release, I wish I could have gotten it in this release, but I had to draw the line somewhere. 🙂

Go check out Maquarium and let me know what you think. Cheers, Will

# posted at 6:48 pm by Will

June 4th, 2002

Just a quick note tonight. One of my fellow employees at Panic runs a web site called Snap Club. If you are an aspiring photographer, head on over and contribute.

Wade

# posted at 5:29 am by Will