Regardless of people’s opinion on the App Store and the iPhone you can’t deny that it has had a huge impact on Mac development in general. When I started out roughly four years ago I was utterly frustrated when I found out how few people were doing Mac development. There were hardly any books (except for outdated ones) and very few good resources except for Apple’s own documentation.

Now however I see new books being published all the time and the internet is flooded with questions and answers about both Cocoa and Cocoa Touch development.

You can’t dislike that.

I’m back from San Francisco after getting my brain stuffed with so much material that it almost hurts. The conference was great and the people I met aswell but the food sucked (as expected). What I learned is that don’t hesitate to skip sessions for labs. The problem with the sessions was that they were often either too basic or too advanced.

Some sessions marked as ‘intermediate’ should have been filed under ‘beginner’ but I tried to leave those as soon as I got the idea of the material covered. On the other hand, the expert sessions were sometimes so hardcore that the engineers had to rush through the material to get everything done in time. I wouldn’t mind having some of those sessions a bit longer and at a decent pace.

However the labs rocked! Apple engineers are very, very nice people, both patient and willing to help. Talking to the person who made the stuff you are dealing with is invaluable.

Overall, I would highly recommend going to WWDC for any serious developer. Also, you are guaranteed to meet other like minded people, which is both useful and fun.

I’ll be attending WWDC for the first time this year, sucking in as much as I can in five days. It’s going to be a blast for sure. I haven’t decided what to see yet but at a quick glance it seems to be packed with both sessions and labs. If you are going aswell please leave me a comment, I’d love to meet up.

Sources tell me it sold out faster than ever and I’m guessing that the iPhone is playing a big role this year.

I’ve been working very hard on the next version of Peel for the last few days. It’s been more than a year since I started a new fresh project for Peel 2.0 and unfortunately I haven’t focused enough on getting it done. I’m really feeling good about this now and I think it’s coming along strong this time. Here is a sneak peak of the current state of the app.

If you’ve used the current version of Peel, you should be able to see a lot of improvements.

Here is a list of few of my favorite new features:

• RSS Support
• The ‘web’ feature has now been replaced by a RSS-view displaying the post containing the song
• Folder structure
• Smart lists (two showed here, ‘Today’ and ‘Unplayed’)
• Clicking a song in the RSS-view plays the song
• Currently playing song is highlighted in the RSS-view
• Refreshing blogs has been sped up a lot
• Last.FM support

Hope you like it and don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you think something is missing.

Ps. It should be noted that this is not just a Photoshop mock-up and some of the interface elements will probably change.

I just received the updated version of Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X written by Aaron Hillegass. I already owned the 2nd edition so I’m quite familiar with the book. I strongly recommend this book for anyone wanting to start developing for the Mac.

Great article by Peter Bright.

There are lots of developers producing Mac applications and utilities. And they’re actually making an effort with them. Conscientious developers, who care about making an application that looks good, works well, and exploits the capabilities of the OS, are putting out great applications for MacOS X. We see applications like OmniGraffle, Adium, NetNewsWire, Delicious Library, Quicksilver, Coda, Unison… these apps are all well put together, a lot of effort has clearly gone into them, and there’s a real sense that their developers care that they don’t suck.

Windows software has never struck me as being like that. The third-party software ecosystem for Windows is big, no doubt about that. But it’s also incredibly shoddy. Most Windows applications—from both major software companies and minor ones alike—are ugly, poorly-thought-out, clunky pieces of crap. While there are a few artisan developers for Windows, most Windows devs just don’t care.

CocoaDev just created a forum for all of us mac loving programmers. I’ve been wondering why there isn’t (or wasn’t) a forum for Cocoa developers ever since I started developing for the Mac. I even thought about creating my own but this is even better.

Go take a look.

Just updated Peel. Somehow a little bug that made the “Add to iTunes” function useless slipped into last build. More strangely nobody complained until just a few days ago.

I’ve also implemented a better registration method that only requires one click from the user. Since launching Peel I’ve been getting about one email a week from people who can’t register. Most of the time it’s because the they didn’t realize that the key needs a correct name and email to work. I’ve tried to guide them through the process as thorough as I can but sometimes that doesn’t cut it so I end up doing it manually and sending them the necessary files. I’m hoping my new registration method will solve this once and for all.

Fixed

• Adding songs manually to iTunes doesn’t work
• Sometimes HTML-tags slipped into the name (if no ID3 tag was found)

Added

• Better tag support. Now supports ID3v1 tags
• “One click” registration method

Head over to getpeel.com and grab the new version.